A stripped-back guide to Insurance.
There’s a whole lot of nonsense and unnecessary complexity in the world of insurance. The baffling nature of it is only made worse by Insurers bolting on offers and upgrades and cross and up selling everything against the middle. The result: gobbledegook and jargon madness.
Buying it doesn’t make life any easier. Going back and forth between comparison sites and sifting through labyrinths of incomprehensible small print — it’s stressful, takes ages, and you might not even have the right kind of protection at the end of it.
So in the KINSU spirit of stripping back all the nonsense, complexity and pain to create a more human kind of insurance, here’s a pared down and, hopefully, more human kind of guide to what it is and how it works.
What is insurance?
Risk protection from financial loss. That’s it and that’s all. It can take many forms, like content, home, health, life or travel insurance. But at its most basic level, it means that when the unexpected or unfortunate happens and your stuff gets lost or stolen, your house is flooded, or your fall sick — the money side of things are taken care of.
How does it work?
Insurance is a contract: You pay a relatively small monthly amount — the premium — to the insurer in exchange for a policy which offers a pay out of a certain amount to cover your costs if things go south.
The system works by pooling the money you paid for your policy with the money from everyone else who take out policies from that insurer. When you make a claim, what gets reimbursed comes out of that accumulated pool.
So, say there was a fire which causes £100,000 worth of damage to your house (or a rather expensive gadget). Instead of having to fix it up by taking out a loan of that value or drawing it straight out of your account, having insurance means that the £100,000 can be paid out from a pool of, say, £1 million where 10,000 people pay £100 each to protect themselves against the risk of fire.
Why do you need insurance?
Insurance is your safety net for when things go wrong.
Of course, if you’ve got enough cushioning in the bank to replace your stuff without much fuss when they break or inexplicably disappear, or pay for medical costs if you get injured while travelling — then you probably don’t need insurance.
But, if you have things that are a tad too pricey to replace at a moment’s notice — say, a house — then it’s probably a good idea to make sure you have protection when you need it.
Insurance, a social good?
It’s all too easy to see Insurance Companies as a profiteering bunch of racketeers who’ll do anything to pump a premium and duck a claim.
But Insurance was and still can be a force for good: a simple, socially conscious and egalitarian way of us looking after each other; having each other’s backs — where the small premiums of the many are used to protect against the misfortune of the few.
In that way, whether with homes, health, travel or even pets for that matter, Insurance weaves a kind of community-based safety net by getting people to share risks and protect each other.
By protecting yourself against risk, you are contributing to protecting the welfare of others as well as your own.
But just how good is my policy?
Figuring out what’s included and not in a policy, and the process of both buying it and making a claim on it can be highly stressful, and often you end up purchasing a product that you might not fully understand, or one that doesn’t give you the coverage you thought it did. Or both.
And it’s only when you go to make a claim that you find out the product only pays a small portion of what you need.
Most insurance companies also ask you to list every item you own above £500 or £1,000 and will only cover the stuff you have explicitly included. But if you forget something, or get the price wrong ( you’re only human after all) your claim could be denied.
Underinsurance might also mean that the product doesn’t offer the terms of protection you need. For instance, having coverage that stops when you go overseas, policies that exclude claims for ‘accidental damage’ to your things, or requiring excessive excesses which you have to pay upfront when you make a claim.
At the end of the day, all these complications and addendums mean that you might have coverage that doesn’t actually do a whole of covering — and a colossal headache when you try to make a claim.
The Kinsu difference
We want to strip back all the complexity, confusion, conditions, clauses and jargon and offer insurance as it should be: clear, honest, decent, fair.
We want you to know exactly what you’re getting without needing an insurance guru-interpreter. You can check out a sample policy here.
If you want to cover your gadgets, no worries! Mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and cameras are covered as standard in our home contents coverage.
Looking to cover your trusty bike? Standard contents coverage rarely extends to bicycles, but we includes comprehensive bicycle coverage as standard in our “all my things” contents package.
We think that policies should come with common sense as standard. So with Kinsu, you only need to list your most expensive items, and everything else is automatically covered.
There’s a straightforward excess: £50 for all contents claims and £25 for claims on mobile phones.
Oh, and no need to sign up for annual contracts — our policies are renewed monthly, and you can cancel anytime.
And yes, accidental damages are covered for all of your stuff — and follows you wherever you travel in the world, as standard.
Claims promise
We love insurance and how it can help you and the community around you. That’s why we always look for ways to pay out, not wriggle out. If there are any grey areas, we pay — and we will never raise your premiums just because you made a claim. Like we said, insurance as how it should be.
Download Kinsu to see it for yourself.
So that’s it. Insurance Stripped. Just the way we like it. And we hope that you like it too.
