Insurance

Insurance = fear circle. Fear leads to seeking various insurance offers but once you dig deeper to get what you might need, the whole insurance selection process creates more fear.

We addressed the following “fears”.
1 – Home
2 – Car
3 – Travel
4 – Health
5 – Life

1 – Home insurance – we had to get different home insurance since we are not living in our house. It is rented out as a combination of a long term rental and Airbnb. I had to go through a broker to get a commercial insurance that would cover both long and short term rentals. It took me 2 months to work through all the details of this insurance and then that fell through the last week before we left. I was lucky to piece it together again in the last few days. Is it sufficient for catastrophic situations? I wouldn’t bet my life on it. It’s double the price of our regular home insurance and it doesn’t cover earthquakes like ours previously did. Our new insurance also required our renters to have their own renters’ insurance. It doesn’t really cover our personal property since it’s a commercial policy. Every time I dug deeper into our insurance options, I became overcome by fear a bit more. Then I would think we needed to add additional coverage and the circle of fear continued. Supposedly, we are now sufficiently covered, but honestly, who knows.

2 – Car insurance – we did not keep our cars to sit around for the next 18 months. That means we won’t have car insurance at home during our travels. This affects our car rental coverage in different countries that might not have sufficient coverage for their vehicles and then responsibility falls on us. Credit cards offer additional collision coverage but it might not be enough in some geographies. The devil is in the details. Also, since we won’t have continues insurance coverage, we can expect that our car insurance will be significantly higher for the first year when we return. I’m reminded of a scene from “Lethal Weapon” when Joe Pesci goes off on a tirade about cell phone companies. That’s me about the insurance companies.

3 – Travel insurance – you get some through credit cards but should buy additional coverage, usually comes with health insurance for digital nomads.

4 – Health insurance – since our home country is the US, we are pretty much screwed. There is an additional issue with us being from the state of Washington. Accident insurance is not a big deal, we can get that relatively cheap ($400-$600/month). We can also cover most of smaller mishaps by self funding them, paying cash (broken arm = a few hundred dollars, major surgery = a few (5) thousand dollars, etc.) However, God forbid, any of us needs more care, anyone gets some serious diagnoses (cancer, etc.), we would be pretty screwed. We would have to return back immediately, have one of us get any sort of a job with health insurance coverage and then deal with whatever hits us. We were both in agreement that this fear of “what if’s” should not stand in the way of this adventure. We’ll see how it turns out – hopefully, it will be just fine. We’ll be paying for health insurance for digital nomads but I’m not holding my breath that it really means much.

5 – Life Insurance – ours covers us even when outside of the country for extended time, just need to keep paying it. Not all life insurance is valid if you are outside of the U.S borders for more than x amount of time or if you engaged in certain (usually travel related) activities.

Any sort of insurance plays on our fears. We would never get out of the house if we put too much thought into every single bad thing that could happen. Gotta have all these types of insurance (and we have them) but we have both agreed that bad things can happen anytime, anywhere. In the meantime, we gotta live in a moment and hope for the best.