There is one piece of advice that we hear from the news, radio or TV from time to time.
Make sure that you do not buy overlapping coverage because you can only claim from one policy.
Dutifully, you return home to review your plans so as to streamline your coverage.
“Oh my goodness, I have more than one policies covering my life!”
You quickly call your advisor who assures you that it is totally alright.
In truth, you cannot fathom why.
But thank goodness you have the assurance that everything is in order.
A few years later, you hear that same quaint refrain again – and self doubt starts to creep in.
Fear no more.
We are here to help differentiate between policies that you CAN buy multiples of.
And which ones that absolutely must not be duplicated. Usually, that isn’t even a problem.
Life Insurance? – Get as much as you desire
For life policies, you may make as many claims as you wish to.
You could make a claim on multiple life insurances and not get rejected.
Here are some examples of life insurance products that you can get additional coverage on:
Term Plans
Whole Life Policies
Endowment Plans
Investment-linked Plans
Critical illness (CI) Insurance
Early CI benefits
Personal Accident Plans
Heck, you can even include your group life policies into the list.
If your evil HR director stops you from claiming from your company’s group PA plan, just print this article and leave it on his desk.
Image: Dilbert
How do you know if your contract with your insurance company is a life insurance one?
Easy.
A life insurance policy has an agreed sum assured.
That is the amount that you will receive when the undesirable covered events such as death, disability, injury occurs.
If you want to address any Insurance coverage shortfalls on your own, check out FWD Insurance. They have a fully online and hassle free purchase experience.
Hospitalization Insurance – a No-no.
To have two shield plans in Singapore is unlikely nowadays.
The insurers will liaise with CPF for your premium deduction.
Unless there are some serious shenanigans or an epic screw-up, you are unlikely to be insured twice.
One is the magic number here, just like the number of Presidential candidates allowed
Bearing in mind, you can have other hospitalization plans.
Your company may have obtained employee-benefit insurance for all the staff.
Thus, you may be insured under the group hospitalization plan.
In this case, you can only claim for hospital bills once.
It seems to be a waste to have two policies.
But don’t you dare cancel your private Integrated Shield plan to save on your premium!
You must always remember that there are no more iron rice bowls in this modern era.
Once you lose your job, you will lose your group insurance coverage!
There are certain advantages of having duplicate hospitalization coverage though.
If you claim above the annual limits of your company insurance, you have your private shield plan as your backup.
Secondly, you may have learnt that the Integrated Plans are losing money and hence, the insurers are raising your rider premium if you have made a claim.
By having your company insurance pay for your hospital bills, you can retain your no-claim status and enjoy lower rider premiums!
Not sure what we are talking about?
Read about the premium hike for Integrated Plans here.
General Insurance – A definite Maybe.
General Insurance (GI) mostly covers for non-human objects.
Here are some examples of such GIs.
Motor Insurance
Travel policy.
Home Insurance
Pet Insurance
A lot of these plans are based on indemnity.
That means that they are putting you back to a position where you are originally before the accident.
Crash your car? The insurance adjustors will pay for the repair that will restore your Beng-mobile to its pre-accident state.
Your home has been ravaged by a fire? The insurer assesses the value and compensates you an amount that theoretically allows you to replace the original items at market rate.
In truth, no amount of money can replace the emotional value of a chou-chou.
Even if you have double coverage, you will be paid only once.
In the event that you try to claim twice, they will ask for the original receipts.
When you provide a reprint, they will check among themselves and still pay you only once.
However, there are some benefits that can be claimed twice.
They are usually not based on bills but on events.
You can claim hospital cash benefits from multiple policies as long as you meet the minimal stay condition and other terms.
Rule of Thumb
Insurance benefits are usually divided into two categories.
Indemnity or non-indemnity based.
If you are looking at a benefit that pays the full bill (up to a specific limit), it is likely to be an indemnity one.
When there is an agreed value or sum assured, it belongs to the latter.
You should never get two indemnity-based plans that cover the same thing.
For non-indemnity ones such as life insurance, it is perfectly okay to get as many as you should.
Conclusion
We hope this has helped to clear up your confusion over whether you can have multiple insurances.
The answer is a resounding yes for most situations.
However, you need to be a little careful when it comes to Shield plans and insurance policies that cover objects.
If you have a rather complicated claim situation that needs our help to untangle, please feel free to leave us your questions in the comments!
www.ClearlySurely.com aims to eradicate the knowledge gap between consumers and Life Insurance. Our Vision is that one day, every Man, Woman, and Child will be properly insured.
For average joes i.e. not multi-millionaires or billionaires, too high life assured (particularly if using multiple policies) may attract rejection when applying for them. That’s why insurers ask you in the application process, & also double check among themselves how many existing policies, sum assured, and whether you have pre-existing medical conditions or claimed before.
A person having $100K net worth & making $50K a year will probably be rejected if he attempts to buy another life policy that will result in total sum assured (across all life/accident policies) exceeding $2M.
But once an insurer allows it & sign, sealed, delivered, then it cannot back out — unless you can’t pay premiums or if they found out you falsely declared/didn’t declare some important stuff during application.
How much maximum life insurances one can have? Isn’t there a limit to this.
http://www.licpolicystatus.org/
As long as it’s within your budget
Lets say one have travel insurance (death 300k) and life insurance (death 500k) and he/she is death due to plane crash. Can the family member do claiming on the travel insurance and also life insurance? Or he will just be getting max of 500k from life or 300k from travel insurance and 200k from life insurance?
haha this seems like an oddly specific comment, but I shall assume you are asking it out of curiosity 🙂
To answer this properly, assume Tom bought 500k of death cover via a Term insurance and bought a travel insurance that pays out 200k in event of death. If he dies during that travel period, his estate is entitled to claim a total of 700k of death cover.
This is because there is no overlap in coverage. In the sake of protecting myself from any unreasonable onslaught, I would like to say: this is from what I understand, so check with your financial advisor for the final verdict
Do you mean it does not overlap when you take two different insurances from two different companies?