I’ve gotten two cancellation of policiy notices from two different insurance companies who NEVER sent the bill! It’s very irksome and I call immediately and charge the entire premium, but really am annoyed that this is his policyholders are being treated! H thinks insurers don’t really care – I think they should ag least send a bill before sending nasty cancellation notices. Anyone else having this issue?
Our insurance agent says she has tons of customers with the Sam issue, but many may not notice or pay attention until after effective cancellation date. Seems a shoddy way to do business.
One was a nonprofit liability and directors errors and omissions policy. Agent confirmed she and we NEVER received invoice. Today it was fire policy on a rental home. They didn’t bother to state what premises the policy they were cancelling was for! In both instances I called insurer and independent agent immediately and paid.
NO apologies by insurer either time. Agent says she has lots of unhappy clients that are having identical experiences but thankfully I’m proactive enough to prevent coverage lapses.
I like to see the premium, so we can talk with our agent if there’s a huge hike and ask her to shop around for us.
Insurance premiums are among the few things I really like to look at before paying. For our nonprofit, I try not to use autopsy, especially for large amounts. The insurance premium is one of our larger expenses for continuing to provide services.
Interesting. I haven’t received the premium notice for directors and officers insurance for the non-profit I’m involved with. The agent we work with believes we should have received it already, but it’s not in the mail.
With insurance, especially for the non-profit, I ilke to see the renewal and premium info. We have some board changes that went through in December and updates have to be made.
HIMom, can you ask your agent to set up a reminder in his/her calendar and call you a month or so before the new bill is due? Our AAA agent always calls me when the policy is up for renewal even though we stuck with the same insurance co for years. Funny side note - when we paid off the mortgage, our homeowners’ insurance rate went down. I guess we are more vested in the house now.
We have UHC for health insurance. Premium for the coming month is due on the 1st of the month. Today is January 8 and we have not yet been informed what the premium for the year will be. So I just sent what we paid last year. They accept only checks as payment, never send statements of any kind. We get a sheet once a year telling us what the premium is although it’s usually mailed in February sometime. I have no idea what would happen if I didn’t pay one month and don’t want to find out.
Anybody who says government agencies are bad and private corporations are good has never dealt with a private health insurance company vs. medicare.
I wonder if companies do this to get the whole amount at once? I use auto pay through my bank to pay my bills online, but when I set the payments up (for 3-6 months at a time) I make sure I’ve included a payment to each vendor and I double check their websites so I know the amounts are accurate. A couple of them (both insurance companies) have 6 month policies, so on the 7th month I pay $50 more than I did on the 6th month. That way, there’s no lapse. If the bill goes up I may pay a late fee on the difference, but it’s generally only a few dollars. I check in periodically just to be sure there are no problems and to adjust payments if flexible bills (like utility) are different than what I expected.
I know which months certain bills renew, so I make a mental note to check ahead. Now that we have a kiddo in college I’m going back to having a file folder in my filing cabinet with 12 manila folders (one for each month). I used to have one and on the first of each month I’d check to see what important things were due that month (or very early the next month).
Glad that your local agent was able to straighten things out. We had a somewhat similar problem last month. State Farm’s underwriting dept. sent me a cancellation notice after I made some coverage changes through our local agent. I called our agent and he apologized then promised to contact the underwriters. The next letter from underwriting contained a major error, too. More phone calls finally resolved the issue but I never received an apology from State Farm. We will change insurers before the end of this year.
do you know for a fact that they never sent the bill? Is it possible that it was mailed, but it was ‘eaten’ by the USPS machines? (USPS doesn’t deliver 100% of the mail.)
^^I pay bills for our company, and in the past year or so, I’ve noticed more and more calls from vendors for replacements for checks that never arrive at their destination. And we mail them in #10 business envelopes, which are the easiest for USPS’ machines to process. Thus, one can’t assume its the big, bad insurance company. (Although it probably was!)
I work for a company that probably sends 1000 invoices a month. You’d be surprised at how many come back as undeliverable. Sometimes after three months. We’ve gotten them back saying “address unknown”. Now, we are a company that goes to their home. There’s NO WAY that address is wrong. We were actually there!!!
I’d blame the post office before I blame the company.
I have worked with more than a few students who ended up in collections and/or defaulted on their Perkins loans. They swear up & down that the servicer never contacted them for payment. I have received a couple “about to go to collections” notifications for medical bills for which I never received a bill. Frankly, I am inclined to think these are attributed to shoddy accounts receivable practices. It’s frustrating. Having this happen for insurance is really bad … you could have something happen & end up not covered. Yikes.
Our health insurance company did this to us a couple of years ago….we found out when daughter used her card for a prescription…they cashed the premium checks and never notified us OR our agent. No blaming the post office on this one ( although we miss a lot of mail where we live )
