I loved my motorbike; the taste of freedom it gave me, the thrill of riding around some country lanes on a Sunday…then some bastard nicked it. Gutted.

And if you will forgive me the f@@@ing insurance company has spent the last six months trying to wriggle out of paying it. It was taken from my locked garage and I’ve spent half a year chasing, box-ticking and pleading with the slippery buggers as they duck and dive, introducing new hoops for me to jump through whenever they feel like. Beware MCE Insurance if you ever have a bike that you need insuring.

Honestly, I feel like I’ve had my bike nicked twice.

In a recent report by the Association of British Insurers, it declares the insurance industry as a great British success story. I’m not surprised – ‘behind every great fortune is a great crime.’

And I don’t mean the crimes they’re supposed to help us recover from!

As I often coach and have written about extensively, when you buy a product, you’re really buying something else. You buy Netflix, you’re buying freedom from boredom on demand. When you buy new clothes, you’re buying the feeling of improved self-esteem when wearing your new clothes …when you buy insurance, you’re buying peace of mind, right?

Bullshit. You’re buying nothing of the sort. You’re just giving money away, and hoping you never have to call upon the ‘favour’ of an insurance company. Because there’s no peace of mind involved, just lots of stress, worry and sleepless nights.

I will concede that sometimes some of them might pay up when there is absolutely no area whatsoever to negotiate a settlement down…BUT usually the insurance company have whole departments under the guise of ‘checking claims’, but they are actually paid to drive down payment volumes and the size of each pay out.

As if having your house flooded and having to live in a BnB for six months isn’t already stressful enough. Getting burgled will make you feel violated and unsafe in your own home. Having your vehicle stolen and burned out can affect your livelihood.

Then what do you do? Fill in your form, talk to the loss adjusters and get warmed up for a long, stamina-sapping fight with the joyless tight-fisted scumbags.

In my case MCE Insurance started by offering £700 lower…then in February sent emails saying they had uncovered discrepancies…and again in March and again now in April!!! The bike was stolen in November!!!

Basically they are scumbags and you should never insure a bike with them…but all insurance companies and indeed sadly many larger corporates use these bullying and elongation tactics to grind you down and ‘win’ a few quid.

How sad that they are so delusional to think that this is good business practice!

Where do they get off? How do they sleep at night? Probably really well in their top of the range four poster waterbeds. Let’s face it, insurance companies already make plenty of money by the simple fact that the vast majority of their users are thousands of times more likely not to claim in the average year than actually make a claim.

There’s even loads of articles out there with titles like, ‘Should you bother claiming on your insurance?’ Now I wonder whose idea they were?

When you do make a claim, you hope and pray that it will get sorted quickly, and you won’t fall foul of the delay, deny, defend policy they call customer service.

I know that a motorbike is a luxury item – I use my car for work – and insurance companies dragging their feet is much, much worse for people whose house has been flooded. But when we pay our premiums on time, why can’t the underwriters return the favour?

If they pay at all that is.

I Googled how many claims are rejected, I was astounded to see that more a billion pounds’ worth are rejected a year. Home insurance is the most rejected – 378,000 claims are knocked back annually. So these claims are all fraudulent are they? No, I doubt even 10% of them are dodgy.

If you’re not getting your payout, or the company is going fight you every step of the way, what’s the point of even having insurance?

It’s legalised piracy, tantamount to getting mugged on the 1st of every month.

Behind every great fortune is a great crime – and behind that great crime is a loss adjuster, rubbing his hands with an evil cackle.

I’m telling you, if they don’t pay out, they better bloody hope their own insurance is up to date! (Just kidding. I’d never burn an insurance company down. No really, I wouldn’t).

photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/36260914@N08/24932095514″>GSXR 1000</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>