Tag Insurance

Press or Say…

Michael 5 Comments

I had such a variety of topics to pick this week, but to make a long story short, I had a killer phone call with an insurance company that deserves to be talked about. That’s right – an insurance company. Who  would have thought that anybody, anywhere, ever  would come away from a phone call with an insurance company and feel good about it

In general, insurance companies’ phone systems and auto-attendants are designed by the progeny of the Marquis de Sade. Everybody has gone through the drill at least once. Everybody who has insurance. You call the number and get a robotic message similar to this.

“Thank you for calling the Incredibly Misleading Insurance Company, your one stop for home, health, life, auto, renters, business, boat, builders, boat builders, long term care, after care, personal liability, personal property, and accident insurance. To continue un English, press one, para continuar en español presione dos, lietuviams stumti trečiąjį numerį, bizning o’zbekcha to’rtni bosing versiyasi uchun, moun ki pale kreyòl ayisyen peze nimewo senk lan, att höra dessa instruktioner i svensk press sex, aŭ se vi estas unu el la ĉirkaŭ tri homoj, kiuj efektive parolas Esperanton, elektu la numeron sep.”

Your make your selection and in a reasonable facsimile of the language you selected you get the following instructions

“To give you the absolute best in class service please make your selections from the following, but please listen to all options carefully because we changed this from the last time you called.
Press or say 1 to pay your bill
Press or say 2 to get your current balance due and pay your bill
Press or say 3 to hear outstanding claims and pay your bill
Press or say 4 to hear policy options and pay your bill
2 + 2 5 (3)          Press or say 5 to change add or change your policy or increase your policy limits and pay your bill
Press or say 6 to file a claim and pay the new higher premium we will assess you as soon as you press or say 6
Press or say 7 to request a copy of your policy or proof of coverage, pay the service charge for said copy and then pay your bill
Press or say 8 to hear these options again in a different order
Press or say 9 to (hehe) speak with a representative [chuckle]”

Naturally you need to speak to a representative or you would have used the website to conduct your business so you press or say 9, and you are told by the friendly cyborg:

“In order to serve you more efficiently please enter your 43 digit account number, 78 character alpha-numeric policy number, the last eight digits of your Social Security Number, your billing zip code, the number you are calling from, and the first three digits of your childhood pediatrician’s office street address.”

Surprisingly you manage to enter all the required information and the cheerful android tells you:

“In order that I transfer you to the representative to help you best, please tell me what type of assistance your need. Press or say 1 to pay your bill…”

…and on and on.

If you’re lucky, you remember that if you press 0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0 you will be immediately transferred to some unprepared service representative and you might get some satisfaction to the problem responsible for the call to begin with before they put you on “a brief hold” and you are cut off.

But today, I called my medical insurance carrier, specifically myMedicare supplement insurance carrier. And I got the following (the names are changed because I don’t want them to know I’m blabbing this all over the universe):

“Thank you for calling the We Really Do Care Insurance Company. I see you are calling from [repeats my number]. If this is [states my name], press 1, if not, press 2, en espanol, numero tres.”

I press 1.

“Thank you. How can we help you today? You can say “pay my bill,” “track a claim,” “ask a policy question,” or “speak to a representative.””

I said “Speak to a representative,” and in about 20 seconds a cheerful human voice answered. “Hi this is Friendly Frieda. The computer told me who you are but before I continue, please confirm your billing ZIP code.” I did that and in a little over 5 minutes I had all my business transacted. Whew!

That’s it. No drama. No rant. Maybe next week.

I’m older and have better insurance

Michael 3 Comments

I’m sorry I’m so late today. I don’t imagine there were many of you heartbroken over not being able to share your morning coffee and reading time with me but apologize I will anyway. As much as it may seem these meanderings appear to be quite spur of the moment in composition, grammar, and spelling, I give a lot of thought to them. Sometimes minutes! Often they are ready to post the day before you read them which for today would have been yesterday. Now that I think about it, you could say that about any day that happens to be today. But as luck would have it, and lucky for me that luck was there to have it, yesterday I was busy buying a car.

To buy a car is an event for me. Like the cicadas, there is a long time between my appearances at a car dealership. My last purchase was 7 years ago. Things have changed in seven years! Particularly for confirmed used car buyers like me.  I think perhaps it’s the influence of outfits like Carvana, Car Shop, and CarMax, that for what they lack in company name originality they make up with simplified car shopping. One no longer has to travel from car lot to car lot to explore options. If a local dealer leaves their website incomplete of all offerings thinking the few advertised selections will entice the buyer to visit them personally to see their complete inventory as would they had done in the days of print ads in the Sunday newspaper want ads section, that dealer probably closed up or was absorbed into a mega-dealership shortly after Sunday newspapers joined the endangered species list. No, today, if it’s for sale, it’s online. The only walking necessary while narrowing down the choices is back and forth to the kitchen to refill the ice tea glass and the bridge mix dish. 

thumbnail_IMG_0101 (Just out of curiosity, am I the only person left in the world who keeps a dish of bridge mix on the coffee table?) (Am I the only person who still keeps bridge mix?) (Am I breaking etiquette having bridge mix yet never having played bridge?)  So I did my research, narrowed my choices, and what usually would have taken me 3 to 5 weeks of intense searching took me 3 days.

Now believe it or not, car buying is not the focus of this post. (Meanderings, remember?) It did provide the impetus for it. Naturally when you change vehicles you have to update your insurance. I don’t think of insurance very often. Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I had to use my insurance other than to prove I have it so I can register the cars and keep them on the road. And so I can put the new to me one on the road, I had to dig up my insurance information for the transfer. The person handling the paperwork for the registration asked me if I was happy with my current provider and I said they seemed to be fine, they take a little of my money every month and give me a little peace of mind in return, mission accomplished. And she got me wondering if they are taking more than just a little of my money.

It’s been years since I ever considered a different insurance provider. Those of you with the longest memories will remember six years ago plus a couple of months, I wrote a post on how to make money by switching insurance companies. What with all the “rates as low as” and the “save as much as” claims back then, if you were shrewd in your choices and diligent in your switching, you stood to save up to $4000. And that was in 2015 money, who knows what it could be today! (No, don’t try it! It’s satire. But then again…)  Well, they are at it again, and bigger this time! Insurance companies are making claims that make those of a certain recently ousted lying President sound reasonable.

The company with the commercial that features the car with the singing hood ornament opens with a shot of the driver’s phone ostensibly opened to their app proclaiming he saved over $700. I don’t know what he is insuring but I don’t pay that much for a full year and I have as full as coverage can be, right down to rental car reimbursement. All I can take away from that commercial is that if you have a car with a singing hood ornament, the replacement cost must be astronomical! Either that or I’m older and can get better rates.

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So that’s my long winded story to get to a rather trivial point. Now aren’t you glad you didn’t hold breakfast for me.

By the way, I’m continuing my experiment on this WordPress/Anchor partnership. They’ve managed to get Don’t Believe Everything You Think on several platforms. With links to the menu page they are:

Spotify BreakerLogo PocketcastsLogo RadioPublicLogo

And of course, at Anchor:

Anchor

Please let me know what you think. So far I’m still mostly just recording the blog posts but eventually there will be more than that. We might even get into a discussion about how we all got into blogging. 

Join the Club

Michael Leave a comment

Last week was special for me. I got mail, real USPS delivered mail that wasn’t addressed to “occupant,” wasn’t a bill, and didn’t include a detailed accounting of all medical procedures from the previous month. Oh, and it wasn’t a Christmas card either although we’re getting to that time when all the businesses I deal with send their cards out. After those come the cards from real people. But I digress. But that’s not unusual.

So, back to my tale, the mail came and therein was an envelope and within was a check. Not a bill. A check! Somebody was giving me money! It wasn’t a lot but it was mine. Coming to me. Income, not outlay. I felt so special. I practically beamed!

Now to be perfectly honest, this wasn’t anything unheard of. It happened before. In fact, it usually happens about once a year. The check in question was a disbursement from my insurance company. (Home and auto, not health or life. Those guys never give anything back. Well, technically life insurance does, but it’s usually too late to be much use.) Usually around this time each year I get a little check from the insurance company that reflects something they saved because they had fewer claims than they expected or some such thing. I don’t understand. I just spend. It’s like a Christmas Club.

ChristmasBankAh ha! Now we get to the heart of this post. Christmas Clubs. Do they even still exist. Those of you under 40 may have to find an even older adult to explain Christmas Clubs, right along with Broken Records. To be fair to the financial institutions of America, most credit unions still offer Christmas Clubs although Vacation Clubs are by far more popular. But neither have the favor they did before the credit card explosion of the early 1970s.

So when I opened the mail that day last week and pulled out that little check, my first thought was, “Wow, just like a Christmas Club.” My second thought was, “Wow, just like a Christmas Club.” My third thought was, “Okay, now you’re sounding like a broken record.”

And then I went out and spent.

 

 

Buy, Save, Repeat

Michael 2 Comments

Congratulations!  You are about to discover a sure fire way of making money at home.  No, it’s not stuffing envelopes or even the twenty-first century equivalent, sending out serial e-mails.  No, it’s not completing surveys or even the old-fashioned equivalent, convincing patsies that they can make money by giving others their opinions.  It’s not coupon clipping, rebate responding, or cyber shopping.  It’s insurance!  Specifically, auto insurance.

Lately my mailboxes, old-fashioned and new-fangled, have become repositories for solicitations to change my car insurance.  I’ve had the same insurance for over 20 years and they say that is when one should seriously consider switching.  Complacency builds and what was a bargain then can be a wallet buster now.  So I took a good look at some of the offers and discovered that there indeed was money to be saved.  In fact, there was money to be made.

Every offer had some huge savings that I was overlooking.  There were savings of $400, $450, even $500 to be had.  There were premiums as low as $19 per month.  There were offers of 75% off of what I am currently paying. It didn’t matter if it was a big company, little company, on-line only, or multi-service.  The insurance version of the name brands – Liberty Mutual, Travelers, Nationwide – were represented.  The ones nobody had ever heard of but sounding like the name brands – Safeco, National, 21st Auto – were there.  The ones with cute ads – Farmers, GEICO, Progressive – were in on it too.  Everybody wanted to save me money!  Everyone from Allstate to State Farm had cash to offer. How nice of them.

So, here is the plan.  Step one, switch to one of the low premium companies.  The best plan is to replace my current insurance with one that has a monthly premium of the low, low price of $19.  Once that’s established, trade it in for 75% savings over my now new cost for a newer, lower, lower outlay that comes out to the remarkably low, low, even lower as in less than $5 per month.  Now, switch to the dollar savings that range from $415, to $450, to $500 for a total savings of $1365.  Subtract the $5 premium payment and we net an income of $1, 360!  There are enough companies offering these fantastic savings that we can do this at least three times for a total money haul of over $4,000.  That’s a used car.  Not a very good one but a car just the same.  And where there’s a car there’s a need for car insurance.

Car insurance, – a sure fire way of making money at home.  Buy, save, repeat.  You gotta love it!

Now, that’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?