During Will preparation - Did you know re. Life Insurance may revoke your beneficiary? | General financial discussion | Discussion forum

What annual bill? We only ever hear from them when they are putting the rates up. Otherwise, it's on an automatic deduction at the bank.

I guess I'm superstitious. I don't want to spend money on life insurance a year in advance. What if I die the next month? And with auto-deduct, I don't run the risk of missing a payment - and a payout.

You must have a different kind of insurance. Our rates go up about every five years, but we knew this from the beginning, that they would go up.

My memory goes back to the 1950s. The insurance agent, whom I remember very clearly as a smarmy Brylcreem-pasted fellow with glasses and a phoney soothing voice (I can still hear the voice in my head), did come to the house periodically, maybe once or twice a year. My parents wouldn't have been able to afford annual payments.
They have tried, but I have never let an insurance agent into my house except for the mandatory home safety inspections.
They are a dubious breed. I had one recently whose bio said he was a Registered Nurse, presumably because he thought that would encourage trust. I thought it odd that a nurse would go into life insurance, so I looked him up on the College of Nurses' website. It turned out he had been found guilty of misrepresenting his educational credentials. No, thank you! I got our file transferred to someone else. And I had the satisfaction of telling him why, as he asked. The silence on the other end was deafening and lengthy, and I did not break it. He couldn't think of anything to say - quite something for a salesman! I guess he never thought anyone would look into his murky past.

Was never a big fan of life insurance. Had it when we were young with a big mortgage and 2 kids. Once the mortgage was under control and the savings grew, and I knew my wife could get by if the worst happened, I cancelled it. Didn't feel right about taking odds on whether or not I die outside the actuary table average. Turns out the "Freedom 55" plan didn't allow for actual inflation anyway....from what I hear.

Right now, I am in the throes of disengaging from an Enercare policy (furnace insurance). This process has taken the better part of a year since they refused to cancel it when I asked them to. They claimed my request was "too late". and that somehow in their annals they had a recording which showed I agreed to this. Who knows? It would have been quite a few years ago. It's just a cash grab, as I requested the cancellation during the warm weather and no work had been done on the furnace since the previous year.
After numerous phone calls, the person on the phone proposed that we could transfer to another cheaper policy and get a refund of the difference over some months. We agreed to this as it was considerably cheaper and otherwise it would have been small claims court - a pain. The absurdity, however, is that the policy he offered in exchange, and the one we agreed to, was to insure an item they know we don't even own (and never have owned)! I am not kidding.
Despite all this, we have had two phone calls recently from them wanting to make an appointment based on our now-nonexistent furnace insurance for cleaning plus several to service the item we don't own. Mischievous spouse thinks we should agree to have them come to service the item we don't own, anticipating much hilarity as we leave it to them to find it! But that would be mean...
Normally they never call and we have to call them. The person who calls insists that we do have this insurance in place. If we take him up on this, I'm sure we will then be told we have to pay for it.
So, yeah, I understand about how hard it can be to get rid of auto-payments.

We had a policy for something else, can't remember what right now, which expired on a certain date. They kept on billing us even after the policy was no longer valid. However, when we raised this with them, they did refund it immediately. But you have to ask. This shouldn't be necessary. They could programme it in if they wanted to. I'm sure they never pay out accidentally!

When we bought the house a few decades ago, we actually inherited a transferable policy which provided for furnace REPLACEMENT. All we had to do was keep paying the premiums, which were not onerous, on the old furnace. Sure enough, it died a couple of years later, and they put in a new one for free. The new one was still going when we voluntarily replaced it last summer (which is why I wanted to end the current maintenance/insurance policy). However, they don't offer policies for replacement now. We do use gas, so they must come.

I'm sure they do make a lot of money on these policies, as they are expensive.

The latest thing is expanding the rental market. In the last few weeks I have received information that I didn't want offering to rent me not just water heaters (which are common here) but also furnaces and central air conditioners as well as blenders and food processors etc etc. Makes no sense to me, and the monthly prices were very high, but it may be a growing usurious market for people who are cash poor. And they always will be cash poor if they keep on renting this stuff. The prices were so high that they reminded me of the cheque-cashing businesses. They also had rent-to-own, after you'd paid for the thing about four times.

Yes, you can put a stop payment on the auto-deduct at the bank. Last time I asked, there was a fee for doing so at CIBC. And that, in itself, will not get you a refund. Cheaper to get them to stop at source if they are a legitimate company.

Good idea to ask them to produce the tape. I'm sure they say that to intimidate. However, in the interim, they would just keep on charging you. I have seen so much garbage with CSRs in recent years that I have no hope that they would ever do what I asked. It would probably require a sternly worded letter from a lawyer, which would cost more than it's worth. Downgrading to the policy for the non-existent item was the cheapest way out, I think - and it provided me with a great story to tell about their gouging procedures and how ludicrous they are.