The Taboo Subject of Life Insurance

Life insurance is a tough subject to think about. It only takes a coastal walk along a sheer cliff-top, or a near miss on the drive home from work to realize that it probably is something one should consider sooner rather than later, especially in regards to the fact that the younger and healthier you are, the cheaper your premiums will be.

The real problem with life insurance is, well, it’s never fun.

Car insurance is equally dull. But because it is the law to be insured, the majority of drivers get on with it and make sure their policy is up to date. That said, unlike the history of life insurance, the history of car insurance is sprinkled with many humorous stories of stupid people claiming for stupid things. Some claims forms have featured such absurdities as: ‘I had been driving for forty years when I fell asleep at the wheel and had an accident.’ And: ‘On approach to the traffic lights the car in front suddenly broke.’ And my personal favourite: ‘The accident occurred when I was attempting to bring my car out of a skid by steering it into the other vehicle.’

In terms of humorous home insurance claims, there is the famous story (sadly later proved to be fiction) of the man who insured 24 particularly expensive cigars, smoked them, and then attempted to claim his insurance because they had been destroyed by fire. He succeeded in court, but once he’d cashed his cheque, the insurance company sewed him for arson.

Back to reality though, and the claim of Philip Clough. After shoving some washing into his machine before going away for the weekend, he returned to find the machine still spinning on a boil wash. The insurance company subsequently denied payment because they believed their policy didn’t cover steam damage. Luckily for Clough though, the courts saw things differently on grounds that steam is H2O, just as water is.

Although ironic, it seems to me that if the general public were to learn to laugh about life insurance, then maybe people would be able to think about it more seriously. Quite frankly, who wants to contemplate what’s going to happen after you’ve gone?

It is almost a taboo subject for some people, unless it comes up during conversations about fraud or disease, it seems barely interesting at all and thus less at the forefront of our collective imagination. But the really funny thing is that it is the only policy that is pretty much certain to be paid out.