A few weeks ago I complained about how my insurance company, Allstate, was dragging its feet on processing a claim I filed. It wasn't even that they were slow in paying the money; they actually did that fast once they started. The problem was that they didn't even start for 10 days. I spent those 10 days without a car getting a runaround from ( Read more... )

Monday was a day without a car. Well, so were Saturday and Sunday and part of Friday. I didn't notice us temporarily being a one-car family over the weekend since we did mostly take it easy. On Monday, though, it hit me when I made (solo) plans to go out for lunch, walked down the stairs, and realized... there's no car in the garage ( Read more... )

Things are finally moving forward with my insurance company. After I started my claim last week Tuesday basically nothing happened for ten days. All they did in 10 days was neglect to return my calls (I left several voicemails with modest, pertinent requests), kick my claim from one team to another, and make flimsy excuses about nobody answering my ( Read more... )

The damage to our car- a stick jammed in the radiator- should be covered by insurance. I called our insurer, Allstate, earlier this week as soon as I learned about the nature of the problem. I started a claim, got an adjuster assigned, then drove the car to my trusted specialist mechanic. The shop started diagnosis later that day and waited for an ( Read more... )

This afternoon I spent 90 minutes sitting at the tire shop to get two tires on our convertible replaced. Just four months after our last visit to the tire shop, here we are again. Two more tires have fallen victim to the pothole riddled roads in the SF Bay Area ( Read more... )

Last week I wrote about a prescription medicine that used to be free now costing me $2,000/year after my employer switched health care plans. Since then I've explored a few alternatives. Unfortunately the news gets worse.

• I met with my doctor and explained the situation. I asked to switch back to a different drug I took a few years ago that worked ( Read more... )

I got bad news when I went to refill one of my prescriptions last week. I now have to pay $2,000 for it. Previously my out of pocket cost was zero.

What changed? My company changed insurance carriers effective January 1. Although both my old plan and my new plan are HDHPs/HSAs with similar specs on paper, one of the hard-to-figure-out-in-advance ( Read more... )

Well, my prescription drugs are no longer free. The pleasant surprise I had in August when all of the regular prescription medicines I take became free of charge has been undone. It's not that the insurer backtracked on its policy of making preventive drugs available at zero copayment; it's that my company switched its selection of healthcare plans ( Read more... )

My company is switching up its health care plans. The change is unexpected because we're in the middle of a plan year. Yes, our plans have run from July 1 to June 30 so far. That's been annoying because while the plans run on that cycle, certain important things related to them, like say deductibles and tax limits, run on a Jan 1 - Dec 31 cycle. ( Read more... )

In Game of Thrones S5E8 one of the POV characters sees a man selling insurance. You wouldn't know it at first, though, because it's described literally as gambling. Furthermore it's characterized as macabre.

The character narration goes something like this (paraphrased):

"The man is a gambler. Ship captains bet with him on whether they will ( Read more... )