Is Your Insurance Cover Enough?

Paying for more insurance than you need is a waste of money, but it can be even more costly to get caught without enough coverage and getting just the right amount of insurance can be quite tricky. If you’re underinsured, you could suffer devastating losses — flood, fire, theft — and risk not being able to return to the lifestyle you’ve worked hard to achieve. Yet if you over-insure, you’re throwing money away every year on unnecessarily high premiums. What you need is a way to tell the amount of coverage that’s just right for you and here’s how to go about it.

Insurance is a form of risk management; it’s protecting yourself and your family, your business and your property, basically what you consider valuable or important from a loss, of which you might be able to financially recover from. However, not many Nigerians have enough insurance, and some unfortunately don’t realise this until it’s too late. Sometimes people are underinsured or don’t have insurance at all because they think insurance is not affordable or accessible, they don’t consider their assets worth insuring, they don’t understand how insurance works, or they believe they are spiritually covered.

But have you ever considered what would happen to your life and your family if you didn’t have enough insurance and your property is badly damaged or destroyed. How would you recover? If something unexpected happened, such as a fire or theft, how would you replace your valuables without the help of insurance? Would you have enough savings, or would you fall back on family, friends and charities to recover?

When purchasing or renewing an insurance policy, it’s important to strike a balance and make sure that you make an informed choice. Use these guidelines to help you determine the coverage amount you need to ensure you’re backed adequately by your insurance.

  1. Know What Your Existing Insurance Policy Covers

Not all insurance covers are created equal, there are exceptions and extensions. That’s why it pays to know in depth, what your existing or intended coverage offers. You can begin by understanding the types of coverage available from your insurer and make sure you understand the insurance product you have chosen by carefully reading the Product Disclosure Statement, which sets out the policy that your insurer supplies. Don’t wait till a contingency occurs before you read through the fine prints of your insurance policy; it will be shattering to find out “at this time” that your policy does not cover this loss!

  1. Review your insurance plan regularly.

It’s a good idea to keep tabs on your insurance plan periodically to make sure you have enough cover, calculate the current value of your insurance coverage. This is because your financial or personal circumstances would have changed, for example “If you bought education insurance when your first child was born, and you’re now on child No. 4, you’re definitely long overdue for an upgrade. Remember that inflation would mean that the amount of cover you choose now may buy less in the future. Review the sum you have insured on your policies each time you renew them to make sure your cover doesn’t get eroded by inflation.

  1. Keep a record of your insured valuables

We normally like to have a sum up of our valuables in our head, but that’s not good enough. Thing is, once you arrange coverage for your valuables, it is important to create an inventory and subsequently update to catalog your belongings that fall under your insurance policy. Making this inventory allows you to work out how much it would cost to replace them with brand new ones if/when they are stolen or damaged.

Getting insurance coverage is easy and affordable. If you’re due for a renewal or want to get your first coverage, talk to us about it. We make car insurance as easy as a click, so if you get a new ride this year, in addition to flashing it to your friends, think about protecting it, too.

This article is provided by compareinsurance.com.ng, the online insurance portal for buying insurance from Nigeria’s most serious insurers in 3 simple steps

Kindly visit our website on www.compareinsurance.com.ng or call Sola on 09090004273 to get more information and help today.