I have mentioned this before; banks are good at looking after your money and giving you ways to spend it. They are not so good about helping you out of debt or giving you insurance advice. This is especially so at the teller level, which is where a lot of bank cover is sold rather than advised.

For example, 'Thanks, Mr. Smith. We've got your banking sorted. Would you like insurance with that?'

You have heard it before, possibly not the best thing for you.

I call it the fries approach

We say not. While you may have free travel insurance cover on your credit card, we still recommend taking a specific policy for your travel, especially if it is going to be longer than a few weeks.

Booking tickets and planning, sure up until you get on the plane, or boat, use the credit card coverage (Within the constraints of your cover, travel duration could be a trap if it's a long trip). Once you step on the plane have your real cover in place.

 If you hear this, your adviser may not have explained things as clearly as they could have. 

'Terms' is industry slang or jargon for special terms, which means a client's policy has been modified, by the insurer, from the original standard policy contract your cover was proposed on. 

The offer of terms or special terms offer generally happens at application time, but can be applied during the policy or at claim time. If the insurer becomes aware of a material fact, that will change the terms of the contract the insurer would have offered at application time. Avoid the later two examples as they can have unintended and surprising outcomes. 

Diana’s Clements recent article on heart attack definitions in trauma insurance and the situation of a claimant in Australia, not getting paid for his heart attack, has put the spot light on the definition of a heart attack in trauma insurance here.

Looking into heart attack definitions in the market, from what you can presently buy, the quality level across heart attack definitions is quite surprising.

There has been plenty of contention about Sovereign heart attack definitions over the years. The rating for this would suggest it’s somewhat founded, with a 21% gap between it and the best rated heart attack definition.

As our largest life insurer, Sovereign also has the largest number of trauma policies on their books.

I was reading a policy working recently and it had a definition of death in it that I found humorous. Not that dying is humorous but the way it was written was.

Death/Dies - Means irreversibly dead with no possibility of resuscitation.

It was along the lines of doh! yeah already, it’s life cover, you’re dead it pays, what’s hard about that.

Thinking about it, we’ve had stories reported in the media about people being pronounced dead, then waking up in the morgue or the autopsy table, some hours/days later.

Exclusions and policy terms, another good reason to regularly review your insurance coverage

An unfortunate fact of life is; time marches on and we all get that little bit older. This also means the policy you took last year, five years or ten years ago may not be quite as appropriate now as it was at the time you first took it.