Insurance Advocacy and Advice

We have been lucky enough to have a tree outside our kitchen window with a horizontal branch at eye level. On most days a single tawny frogmouth would sit motionless on the tree branch several metres away. He could see us looking at him. We named him Buckbeak. Sometimes there were two tawnies sitting on the the branch. The second tawny was named Fluffy. She was a little smaller, fluffier and paler. Over the years, Buckbeak and Fluffy had babies but we could not tell them apart. The babies would grow up, learn to fly and leave the area.  But Buckbeak and Fluffy would stay. They would have more one or two more babies each year. The babies were always named Snowball1 and Snowball2. Each morning our kids would get up and provide a tawny update. We loved watching them and we took hundreds of photos. The tawnies moved around to other trees but they would always come back to the branch that we called the Tawny Port. It was hard to find out much information about tawny behaviour online but

I have travelled around the world several times and I have never had any bad experiences. However a few years ago I was in Johannesburg with my family and I wanted to visit the world famous museum called the Cradle of Humankind. I asked a taxi driver whether he thought it was a good idea for me to hire a car and drive my family across town. He said I would be fine provided that I followed his advice: Stick to the main roads. Don't drive through the downtown area. Make sure my phone was fully charged. If the car breaks down, don't get out, just call for assistance. Don't give money to anybody at the traffic lights. Don't wind down the windows. Keep all the doors locked. Only drive during daylight hours. The South Africa 2019 crime statistics show that a carjacking occurs roughly every hour in Johannesburg. Carjackings have become so common that some insurance companies will not ensure some vehicle makes such as VW. Making an insurance claim is like being a naive tourist

Around 500BC, Sun Tzu wrote, “if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” Whilst I don’t think he was directly referring to insurance companies, these words are still true today. Whilst you can not defeat an insurance company, there are five facts you need to know and five mistakes that you should avoid. Fact 1: The insurance company knows that the client wants to settle the claim and resume normal life as soon as possible. A claim for major loss has to be one of the most stressful life events that you can experience.  So when the claim process starts there is a sense of relief as the claim is underway and the long process back to a normal life has begun. The process begins with an assessment from the insurance company. It is followed by an assessment from their builder. Then the stalling tactics might begin. If it is a claim for major loss, the client is living elsewhere so there is a huge incentive to get things settled as qui