The Editor:
In a previous letter I spoke about the good people who helped us through the flood recovery in July, but, there is also a negative side to this whole event.
That side was dealing with insurance issues, and I feel this has to be brought to light.
When the flood took place, we went to our insurance broker, as we were supposed to. A claim number was issued to us, a “sorry for your loss” was said, and then basically it was, have a nice day.
It wasn’t until we spoke to a third-party insurance adjustor that we learned our insurance was capped at a certain dollar figure.
Now, why did a third party have to relay to me that we were capped and that basically, with that cap, we would be left with four walls in our basement?
It is the duty of our insurance broker to bring this to our attention and honestly, that was never mentioned to us. Yes, we did have sewer back-up insurance and when we paid the extra for that, we thought we were buying extra insurance. We paid an extra $350 for this so-called sewer back-up insurance. We weren’t told and nor did we ask that by paying for the extra insurance for sewer back-up basically nullified the rest of our policy. No content, no structure, just a dollar cap.
We were also not told we could have paid even more money for a higher cap.
I blame our broker for not doing their due diligence and explaining to us just exactly how all this worked.
I talked with quite a few people after the flood and basically everybody who was with this certain insurance broker, said the same thing and that they were capped at a certain dollar figure and the full ramifications of their insurance policy had not been explained to them.
I learned a valuable lesson out of this, and that is, when dealing with and buying an insurance policy, don’t just get it in the mail, write the cheque, drop it off at the broker and carry on. Read the policy. If there is something you don’t understand, have the broker explain it to you and if need be, have them write it out in plain English, not lawyer lingo, so you’ll know what you are paying for and will receive if you experience another flood.
A footnote to this. I am no longer signed up with that certain broker, so I thank them … for nothing.
Greg Curtis
Estevan
