[imagesource:here]

Accidents happen, and to some people, they happen more often than others.

You can go years without making a claim and then bang, just like that, you’re forced to submit multiple times in a matter of months due to circumstances beyond your control.

If that happens, you might expect your insurance company to suck it up after all those years of premiums, but that’s not necessarily the case.

When consumer journalist Wendy Knowler enters the fray, you know things are about to get spicy, and that’s exactly what happened after she was alerted to the behaviour of OUTsurance by Sarah Midgely.

Midgely detailed her dealings with OUTsurance in this Twitter thread:

*STEPS ONTO SOAP BOX, CLEARS THROAT*
The reason we get insurance is to guard against unforeseen events that can cause us damage. Insurance by nature is rooted in uncertainty. And we like to know that when an unexpected event happens, our insurer will be there for us. What we

— Saartjie (@iSarahdactyl) March 8, 2021

You can click through that thread, or read it in full here.

In a nutshell, Midgely was informed that OUTsurance was cancelling her insurance policy, after she made a number of claims over a short period of time.

In addition to that, she says “no other insurer would touch me… [due to] an Information Data Sharing System, in which all information about my policies and claims are shared with other insurance companies”.

As Knowler pointed out on CapeTalk, this could happen to anybody, and it’s better to “jump before you’re pushed”:

It doesn’t matter how long you’ve had no or few claims, if you’re going through a bad patch or bad luck then you’re in very real danger of being offloaded/dumped/fired/cancelled…

Your premiums and excess may be higher [if you switch], but it beats being offloaded by your insurer because of what they call an ‘unfavourable loss ratio’.

Once you’re offloaded, finding insurance elsewhere will be tough, and even if you do, the premiums are likely to be “hellishly expensive”.

Insurance really is the embodiment of an expense we begrudgingly put up with, so to think that you can be turfed out for making legitimate claims after years of forking out cash is pretty infuriating.

After Midgely reached out for help, Knowler contacted the Ombudsman for Short-Term Insurance, and they confirmed that OUTsurance was technically within its rights to terminate:

According to the Ombud’s office, all the policy holder protection rules require is that the insurer gives the policy holder at least 31 days’ notice of the intention to cancel the policy. They must give reasons in that cancellation letter.

Ultimately, it pays to know your rights, especially given that many of us sign off on insurance policies without reading all the fine print.

You’ll find the full CapeTalk interview below:

[source:capetalk]