The Assurance of Insurance
It is safe to say that Australians have had a hard time with it these past few years.
Locally there were statewide bushfires that ravaged the countryside, the 1 in 500-year floods, that not long followed the 1 in 100-year floods. We had locality lockdowns, state lockdowns, workplace lockdowns, school lockdowns, and almost every other imaginable lockdown!
The economy has seen unprecedented property booms, pricing regular Australians out of owning their own homes. This has led to increased pressures on rental markets, and increasing living expenses, leading to a widening gap in income inequality, and the impacts do not stop there!
That is before mentioning the impact of COVID-19 domestically and internationally these last few years. Combine that with international conflicts abroad adding further stresses to our local economy and our livelihood. One costly example is the sanction on Russian oil causing fuel prices to soar, making it harder for the majority of Australians to get by week to week.
In face of these added financial pressures, it is natural to try to cut costs to your weekly and monthly expenses, with your insurance being one. It may be tempting to reduce your covers, or remove them altogether, to lessen the load on the household budget. It is crucial, however, to leave these in place, and if anything, be doing a thorough review of your covers to ensure that you are appropriately insured.
If anything is to be taken from these turbulent last few years, it is that the environment and world we currently live in is highly unpredictable. Everyone has been holding out for a reprieve from pandemics and disasters, only to encounter another around the corner. We simply do not know what will come next. Whilst you may find it hard to work your insurance into your budget, it would be a lot harder to make up for the loss of an uninsured event.
Recently, many people had been left exposed by their insurance, discovering that they weren’t covered for flood in the most recent flood of claims. They opted to not add this crucial cover for a relatively small fee, as they opted for a bare-bones cover when placing their insurance as this is what was cheapest. Too many fall into a false sense of security, reciting the age-old rhetoric ‘it won’t happen to me.
In the face of such uncertainty, we must pay the small cost of appropriate insurance, to protect ourselves from the far greater cost of being uninsured.
