Pav’s Patch; Forget insurance, I’ll take a chance

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN once said that the two things you can’t avoid are death and taxes. He might have added insurance.

Obviously, insurance is something that you need — but how much of it?

I’m not suggesting you ditch your buildings and contents cover. I’m talking about the fact that you’re encouraged to insure just about every facet of your existence nowadays.

Currently, I have people trying to persuade me to insure my Sky equipment for a tenner a month, my credit cards for fraud and an inability to pay them off, my holidays, my television set, my vacuum cleaner, my health, my sewers, my mortgage, my life and so on.
I dread the phone ringing because it might be another person trying to convince me of the need for their cover, or should I say, protection.

But it seems to me I could spend my entire salary on insurance for things that most probably will never happen.

Or when they do, you find that there’s a clause that means you don’t get paid. Ever had that problem with a car warranty?

I heard of a man who invalidated his warranty because he had moved his car — it had broken down in the middle of a busy junction.

It happened to me when I once bought a new car from a main dealer. I took out some sort of highly-recommended cover but it never applied when I needed repairs.

Years ago, before I got involved with women, I used to save some money each month and was invited to speak to my building society manager so that he could make my money work better for me.

Well, what he did was to try to make my money work better for him. He tried to sell me insurance against disability and serious illness. It would have cost me a tidy sum each month and none of those disasters has happened in the ensuing years.

On another occasion I was asked to insure my elder son’s PS2. “How much,” I asked? “Only another £2 a month.” So I took it and then found, when I came to settle the balance after a year of payments, that an extra £100 had been added to the bill. And the thing always worked perfectly.

Similarly, I once spent an hour at a large computer retailer as spotty youth and his boss acted out a well-worn plan to browbeat me into taking a service plan. And what really annoyed me there was that the price came down each time I said “no”.

If they can afford to sell it so “cheaply”, why don’t they do so from the start?