The Insurance Industry Doesn’t Want You To Know About This Simple Life Hack Which Could Save You Thousands

Hello, I’m James and this is my blog ‘James Proclaims’.

You may have clicked on this post on the basis that the title suggests it contains some kind of life hack for saving money – money which you would otherwise lose to the insurance industry.

In reality this post contains nothing of the sort. I know very little about the insurance industry. I have insurance for many things, and I expect I’m probably paying too much for that insurance in some respects. I do try to shop around, and I’m ultimately fairly skeptical about the benefits of insurance, but there are some circumstances when you are, nonetheless, legally obliged to have insurance and I don’t really know enough to know for certain that I am getting an especially good deal. Nonetheless, I’d imagine I am pragmatic enough, in most cases, to have the best deal I can get without devoting significantly more of my time to the pursuit of a really good deal. Because I find life more enjoyable when I’m not researching insurance.

I did once work in the financial sector but I was very much a low level admin monkey. I did, at that time, take the exam for the Financial Planning Certificate: Level One and I did pass. But I didn’t really understand that much about Financial Planning, it’s just that Level One is (or was at the time) a multiple choice test and I did just enough practice on past papers to be able to guess my way through most of the paper. Level One, in and of itself, wasn’t really an especially impressive qualification but it was a gateway to the higher level qualifications, which may have led to a more ‘prestigious’ career within the financial sector. I finished the exam in half the time of my colleagues who were also taking the test. They, unlike me, had degrees in Economics and one of them still managed to fail. I don’t know what that says about them or the test. I’d like to say I was magnanimous when the results came out but I was young and therefore probably a bit of an idiot about the whole thing. I left that job and somehow ended up working in education. I imagine that person still works in finance and they probably earn quite a lot more money than me by now. I don’t think I’d enjoy working in finance but I’m not sure I love working in education enough to justify the lower income. I suppose I could claim some sort of moral high-ground, but frankly it would be disingenuous and in any case it doesn’t pay the bills.

However, the main problem about me claiming to offer a life-hack in this post, is less that I know very little about insurance, so much as I don’t really know what a life-hack is. It seems to be one of those terms that floats around the internet as if everyone knows what it means, but from what I can tell, it is little more than a ‘top tip’ and more often than not it seems to be the re-stating of the blindingly obvious. In which case I could probably offer a bit of a life-hack on insurance, which would be this:

Shop around a bit.

Really though, the point of this post, was just that it’s Wednesday and currently on Wednesdays I write fairly empty posts with stupid click-bait titles.

They remain some of my most popular posts.

Make of that what you will.