We Made This Mistake Once Before Buying an Insurance Policy and We'll Never Do It Again

Not reading the insurer's reviews was a huge mistake.

Last year, my husband purchased some insurance for his business. He bought the policy on the recommendation of a new insurance agent who we had never worked with before. Unfortunately, this ended up being a huge mistake -- and one that we would have been able to avoid had we done one simple thing before purchasing the coverage.

Here's the huge error we made when getting covered.

This insurance mistake came back to bite us

When buying coverage, we trusted the agent to pick a good insurer for us. We then charged the premiums for the policy on our credit card without looking deeper into whether the insurance company was actually good.

Specifically, we neglected to read reviews of the insurer. Had we done so, we would have seen that the insurance company had just a 1.05 star rating on the Better Business Bureau website, and we would have seen that there were a number of complaints about the insurer online.

Had we read about these issues other customers had with the insurer, we would have taken another look and most likely found a different insurance company to get coverage from. But instead, we paid the insurer a premium for the whole year upfront and got our policy in place.

The insurer has caused us nothing but problems

Around 10 days after signing up for coverage and paying our annual premium, we decided to cancel the insurance policy and switch to a different carrier. There were a number of reasons for that, including the fact the insurance company had been slow to answer some questions we had upfront, and the fact that we found a better deal by bundling the coverage with some other policies.

When we had previously canceled insurance policies mid-year after paying an annual premium, we received a check back from the company in a timely manner refunding us for the extra premiums we paid. That did not happen this time. In fact, the insurer gave us the runaround and kept refusing to send our premium payments.

Because of the difficulties we faced dealing with the insurance company, we ended up disputing the premium charges with our credit card company -- which sided with us and reversed the charges. Then the insurer started sending us notices that we had to pay the remaining premiums or we could face collections, despite the fact we had canceled the coverage almost immediately.

We're still trying to resolve the issue months later, and we will never again purchase insurance coverage without making sure the company has a solid reputation for customer service.

This taught us an important lesson: It’s really important whether an insurer treats customers well or not. I'm just glad we're only dealing with an issue of a premium refund and not trying to get a claim paid by the insurance company. I can only imagine the hassle we would have faced had we actually been trying to take advantage of our coverage.