Wishing We Opted for the Insurance

Several years ago, when James was about two or three, we decided to rent a 24-foot travel trailer to enjoy a few days of camping. We were so excited! We had everything packed and headed out to the trailer rental place to rent our trailer. I remember it like it was yesterday. We stood there going over the paperwork and then the young woman helping us asked, “Do you want the insurance that we offer?”

Hell no! We don’t need to pay extra for insurance that we won’t even need! We quickly declined. Who knows what we were thinking. This was one of the most costly mistakes we have ever made!

Without embarrassing him too much, I’ll just say Grant could have used some practice driving that big trailer. He ended up scratching the side and denting the rear in two different minor accidents. Needless to say, it put a bit of a damper on the rest of the vacation knowing we had to deal with the physical damage to the trailer when we returned the rental and we had no insurance!!

The bill for the damages that we received was a whopping $11,000! The rental place was clearly trying to make a little more money off of us! In reality, the cost for the repairs was more like $3,000. We had to arrange for our own estimates to fix the damage to prove that the repairs were NO WAY in the $11,000 range. And we did. The repair costs were about $3,000. There was one small miracle, our home owner’s insurance covered about one third the cost of the repairs because the first accident occurred in our yard.

What a nightmare! Insurance is there for our protection and if we just paid that little bit for it at the time, it would have saved us time, money and whole lot of stress.

Life Insurance

We are no longer dummies when it comes to insurance. Consider life insurance. We both have 30 year term life insurance policies, in case God forbid, something ever happened to Grant or myself, the surviving parent would have the money to continue living at the same lifestyle in the absence of the other parent.

Aptus Insurance

If you have young children and neither you nor your spouse has life insurance, it’s time to get a life insurance quote. A good place to start might be Aptus Insurance. This insurance company specializes in connecting their customers with the life insurance policy that’s right for them.

I was reading their new parent guide to see what kind of tips they offered. I was pleasantly surprised to see tips that I was not aware of, as well as ones that I was already aware of, like having retirement and household budgets in order before saving for your child’s college, or having disability insurance is crucial for wage earner’s in families, and life insurance is meant for someone whose death would create a financial hardship, and so on.

I hope that by writing about our bad experience someone (like you dear reader!) is saved from making a costly mistake. When in doubt, opt for the insurance!