Suggest me a good house insurance, health insurance and Life insurance

I don’t know if this is the correct forum to ask this question as zerodha has something new in coin section called Ditto for insurance. The site is still in building. I am looking for a good nice insurance , haven’t done much digging. So if anyone of you have good experience and did research, Please suggest me

  1. Health insurance:- All diseases coverage, Everything paid for hospitalization, cashless would be nice , no cap for room, easy claim process less of headache. What is your recommendation?

  2. Life Insurance:- LIC has so many policies moneyback, endownment blah blah. Too much to read and
    also heard never to combine insurance and investment. I need one Life insurance with disability rider . Which is your recommendation ?.

  3. House insurance:- I have no idea around this. Please suggest me a good one.

Hey @raoawesome, Ditto has authored this module on Varsity, this should help you get familiar with all the nuances of the insurance:

5 Likes

For life insurance, always prefer term policy with no frills attached. Premium will be low and will get the full amount on death.
Will always choose LIC as i am assured that the company will remain no matter how long I live. Will not go for any private company for life insurance.

Disc: my personal views and could be wrong

2 Likes

@raoawesome

  • Life insurance- don’t go with money back policies and so on. Go with plain life insurance policy-
    E.g., For 50 lakh insurance with ICICI you need to pay 400 rs per month.

  • Health Insurance - I have taken HDFC ergo for my family and i got maternity claims without much followups and delays. Only prob with HDFC ergo is customer support will always be busy.
    I got feedback from my friends that Star health insurance is very good. Also take comprehensive coverage for whole family in one plan. Include Add-ons like cancer cover/life-threatening diseases.
    Very IMP: Make sure lot of hospitals having direct tie-ups with the insurance provider. Also, Pre-approved cash (otherwise you need to get attested medical bills, followups and so on) facility should be available.
    Eg., Star Health, HDFC Ergo, ICICI lombard.

2 Likes

I’m insured with Star since 2015. No issues so far but have not claimed anything yet. By God"s grace didn’t fall ill so no need. Hence not aware of claim settlement process

1 Like

I too have hdfc ergo health policy. Fully agree, customer support is inadequate. Last year they increased the premium by 100 percent. The rm told me he will revert with the management and kept me in abeyance, the maturity date was fast approaching and just few days before on follow up, they said nothing can be done and that due to covid claims the premium was doubled. Thought of moving to another company and take a new policy, but then then the premium was more or less same with other company as well. Hence continued the policy with hdfc as i get continuity benefits.

But the way they handled this has led a bad taste. They could have been more professional than pushing the customer to the edge of expiry date and forced to renew the policy

This also made me set up a recurring deposit of xx amount with a bank. 5 years down the line i will have a corpus exclusively for medical purposes and then will reduce the medical policy to a nominal value. No point taking 50 lacks or 1 cr of health policy. A min of 20 lacks would suffice I guess along with this corpus. Dont like the uncertainty and the tricks these guys play

Disc. This could be one off incident and not hdfc ergo regular way of handling customers

1 Like

Similar experience at Star Health. Premium increased 5%. When I wrote to customer care, the executive called and said every company has increased it because of Covid and nothing can be done. Only difference is they didn’t gave false assurance of taking up with management and were straight forward

1 Like

Which one are saying ? There are so many policies in each money back , endowment that I can’t tell the difference. I am just looking for one with disability rider.

1 Like

My mother took United insurance health insurance and a separate corona kavch. Even my company has given me Insurance. I spent 25k for covid, was nearly hospitalized but doctor said I can stay at home and so became OPD, when I check with all insurances they said I cannot claim for OPD at all.

Is it like health insurances don’t cover out patient ? Are diseases like corona are excluded ?

1 Like

Yes. Out patient treatment is not covered by Health Insurance. It is only for Inpatient. My health insurance clearly mentions this. There are lot of exclusions which only an agent can guide you with. Example existing illness not covered during the waiting period 2 to 4 years and there are many exclusions as well. So the best option is to seek advise through an agent and then you need to read all clauses carefully

With regard to Life Insurance, I have no clue on disability beneifts. The best option is ask for “Term Life Policy” to an agent. This is the best option available where you get the sum assured in an unforseen event. You could ask the agent if you could add disability benefit to a Term Life Policy.

1 Like

My suggestion would be to read about health insurance and then take a policy that suits you. Health insurance is a complicated product, you cannot pick one and be done with it.

1 Like

You’ll have to google what might be best according to what you’re looking for. My relatives have all three from HDFC bank. You could check out the packages and see if it matches your requirements. Good luck.

IRDAI has mandated that all insurers must cover hospitalization related to a Pandemic like Covid-19 should be covered. In this case yes a lot of health insurance policies doesn’t cover the cost related to OPD until and unless there’s hospitalization.

When it comes to life insurance, depending on the profile it will be better to go ahead with something like a term life plan because unlike moneyback, endowment, and ULIP plan it doesn’t mix concepts of insurance and investment and that’s the reason term plans are also economical and provide you a good lump sum cover amount.

Coming to the disability rider -

  1. Yes there’s something called a waiver of premium where the insurer will waive off the entire future premium on account of permanent disability due to accidents let’s say (depends from policy to policy)
  2. Accidental Disability rider - where on account of disability as per the policy clause the insurer will pay an amount. Again it depends on the policy - it can be a lump sum payout while it can also be a monthly payout done for a specified time period.

You will get this rider along with term insurance with most of the Insurer

Do you mean term plan with LIC or any other company
?

Depends on your comfort. If you trust private companies, you can go with them, or go with LIC. CSR, claim settlement ratio is not 100% reliable, as each claim is different.

question is which one are you saying for term insurance plan? I can’t say difference and need to read each of those big document.

For someone who trades crude, I am sure reading a document, that too one that will provide a cover for 30 years is not hard.

Which is better, spending time and select an appropriate product, or taking a product and knowing that it was a wrong choice after a while?

I think there is a small period like 15 days with LIC, where in you can cancel the policy, but even then you have to know the details.

Term insurance is an integral part of one’s financial journey, in fact the first step, so take it properly.

1 Like

Well honestly saying, I didn’t put much effort finding and learning about insurance. I guess I am either lazy or these are too boring unlike learning about economy, interest rates, investing & trading. I thought like ‘hey you guys must have done research I will just look at pros and cons , simplified info, make decisions and chose that’ :sweat_smile:.

And in this forum so many people do research and give info that sometimes it spoils me I guess.Only a few months ago I wanted to find best MF , who are the performing fund managers, pros and cons , how good it is with index fund and was about to do research putting graph and suddenly they put this out https://tradingqna.com/t/highlights-from-spiva-india-scorecard-2021-on-the-performance-of-active-mutual-funds-vs-their-benchmarks/129750?u=raoawesome

Well got some direction about term insurance. Let me read each policy and find which one suits me

2 Likes

I can tell you what little I know. I don’t have a term policy, as I don’t have a need for it right now, I may take one in the future. So take my words with some salt.

Term insurance is purely for the term till which we think we need to provide for our dependents, wife and kids, or even parents. Then there is sum insured, our current expenses, recurring expenses, one time expenses, unexpected expenses, and the rate at which they grow, all need to be thought of and choose a suitable sum. Which tenure premium suits, yearly, half yearly etc. See if there is the chance of increasing of sum insured, or if we should take another policy. Then, policy directly from the company, not through agent, because the premium will be low from the company, of course, there is the angle of agent helping in the future if taken through him, I don’t know if this angle is beneficial or not, so individual decision.

I may have missed few points, but this is the essence, you can find out more, so read.

So we should take a plan from mathematical perspective, number based, and pray that our dependents should not claim the policy, meaning we get to live, and let the insurance company take all those premiums for years, and give nothing back, but we get to live happily with our loved ones :family_man_woman_girl_boy:

1 Like