My Love-Hate Relationship with the Insurance Industry

I remember the very first morning I woke up and didn’t have to eat breakfast in my car sitting in a rush-hour traffic jam. We had been warned about two weeks before the end of the month that the company had gone bust and that we’d effectively be working off our last few days, so I definitely knew the day would come, but you never quite prepare for these things because it’s really hard to believe that you’re actually out of a job.

Anyway, it’s funny how you have to set an alarm to wake you up every morning, but on the one morning that you don’t actually have to wake up your body wakes up naturally at the exact time you’re supposed to wake up. Relatively speaking it wasn’t all too long ago and I remember it like it was yesterday – that feeling of excitement and fear all bundled up into one. Finally, it meant that I could pull out that old log book of business ideas I’ve been writing down throughout my working life and try to implement a few of them, more as a matter of urgency than anything else though.

The one thing that immediately jumped out at me was just how much there is to be made if one can find a way to get into the insurance business. It’s really hard actually, completely fraught with the type of red tape that will have you wondering whether or not the powers that be and the established players in the industry don’t want any more competition doing the rounds. That’s where my relationship with the insurance industry reveals itself to be a love-hate one.

I guess that’s perhaps how it is with everyone really – you sort of need insurance, but on the other hand, you realise that if you had a little bit more money coming in every week or every month, you could totally self-insure.

Self-insurance requires immense discipline, however – the type of discipline which sadly the average person just doesn’t seem to have. It would also require you to partner up with other like-minded individuals who are just as disciplined, but that can perhaps be catered to through channels such as joint accounts from which anyone can only withdraw money if all parties who own the account sign off on it.

This brings to light just how much money insurance companies make off of the fear and uncertainty we’re made to live with, in the name of making sure we have that much talked about safety net just in case a financial mishap takes place. I mean imagine if only a mere 2000 of us decided to put the premiums we would otherwise have paid to the same insurance company into an investment account of sorts. With the rate at which claims are actually made and assuming things go half as well as they can in terms of nobody needing to file “claims,” this would grow a nice pool of money which at some stage will be big enough to cover everybody who invested in it, after which point everything going forward is nothing but profits.

The problem with this however, which really leaves one with no choice but to go with the established insurance companies, is that self-organisation is perhaps the hardest thing for people to do on this earth, so the insurance companies will keep getting richer.