A costly oversight – make sure your insurance is current

I received one of those calls yesterday at around 4.50pm that make you ill in the stomach. Obviously 100 times worse for the owner of the home.

What occurred a stolen car was driven into the home before the thief, who lost control of the car, ran off on foot before anyone could stop him.

The only good news was that the husband who is normally in the room that took the brunt of the damage was out of the room at the time of the impact.

The owner rang their direct home insurer of 10 years only to find that the policy had been lapsed last October through non payment of premium.

All I could do is locate an honest builder to do a make safe to secure the home that evening and one of the LMI team based in the city will call in to ensure that the scope of works and costings are fair and reasonable.

The decision to allow the policy to lapse was not done intentionally, it was a simple oversight but a very costly one. It could have been much worse if the home had caught fire.

That is the first point of sharing this story. The second is that everyday I read on social media a home has been broken into, often with armed thugs, and or at least one car is stolen.

There is a huge cost to the community not only in monetary terms but the psychological impact on the victims.

In respect of the cost to the community, in a lot of cases the insurance industry funds the repair or replacement of the asset but the sheer volume of these criminal events, on top of all the weather related events, is adding to the increase in premiums and the overall affordability problem that is worrying many of us in the industry.

But that is the monetary side. The stress of your home, your castle and safe place being violated is massive. My immediate neighbour had 3 youths break into their home in the early hours of the morning. Two others were in the getaway car. The husband woke up and the intruders escaped. The wife and teenage daughter required a series of counselling sessions while the family seriously thought about moving. In the end, they realised nowhere in Melbourne is any safer and beefed-up security.

Government and the courts have been failing the innocent public for way too long. We now are the ones living behind bars, spending more and more on security, yet more afraid than ever even in our own homes while the criminals run free.