What will you do if you have a sum of money in an insurance policy to be claimed? I guess the logical answer is to claim it as soon as possible. However, do you know that there are several unclaimed policies from various insurance companies every year? These policies are usually endowment(savings) policies that had matured and the policy owner are not contactable. In most cases, it is because they had shifted from their residential address, change their occupation and contact number but did not update the insurance companies on these changes.
The policies are kept in force by regular premium deduction through the person’s bank account or it might had gone into an automatic policy loan. When the insurers send the maturity cheques to the policy owner’s last registered address and got an returned mail, they will try to contact the client through different channel. And if the policy owner is still non-contactable, the policy information will be submitted to the Unclaimed Proceed listing in Life Insurance Association. An example of the listing is shown below.
The search was randomly done base on a “ong”. The search return 10 policies in a page and there are a total of 502 pages. That is for “ong” alone… If you want to check if you are one of the lucky claimants to these policy, you can input the possible names whom may leave a sum of money for you and check it here.
In a nutshell, these policies were purchased, paid and forgotten. You might be thinking what about death claims? Is there a possibility that a person had passed on and no claims were made? It is definitely possible. Afterall, if one can forget about his own policy, it is definitely possible that they failed to inform others of their protection plans such as whole life or term plans. In a situation of death claim, the insurance company will not know until a claim is made. It is common to have clients or even strangers calling me and asking me to help them check if their parents have policies with any insurance companies. It is cumbersome and the good news is there are better ways these days. A way is to list these policies in a Will but these information will be released to the right person only upon death. What if you need certain policy information in an emergency and your financial adviser representative is not contactable? Or in a situation where the policy owner is mentally incapacitated?
Another way is to have a insurance policy summary drafted and keep it somewhere either in a hard or softcopy. You can pass this to your love ones so they know of this existence. The disadvantage here is these summaries may be easily misplaced if it is a hardcopy and your data may crash for softcopies.
You can consider an easier and better way by having your policy information secured stored online. You can give permission to who can access to it and limit the information for their access. For example, I may want my spouse to know I have 5 policies from Insurer A, B and C or I just want her to know 4 of those policies. I may want her to know my sum assured but not the cash value of the policies or I may want to let her know every single detail of my policies. The permutations will be differ from one person to another. You can learn more about the this service from the video below.
In additional to policy tracking, we can also use it for policy review to have a snapshot of our coverage and gap as seen in the example below.
This service is usually for my clients ,and for now, I am opening it to anyone who find this service useful and wish to have your insurance policies on this platform. Just drop me an email or submit your contact details for us to assist you.
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