Insurance Deductibles, Theft and Karma

As my husband is fond of saying, the person who thought up the idea of insurance was a genius. Think about it… We happily, or at least of our own free will, pay loads of money every month to be sure that in the unlikely event of something happening to us we’ll be able to get back what was lost or supplement the cost involved. For example, my second son’s nine months of gestation cost more to insure than it actually cost to bring him into the world. But, we were prepared… “just in case.”

One of the most brilliant ideas within the insurance industry is the deductible. After paying religiously, month after month, year after year, when it finally comes time to actually file a claim you find yourself face to face with another bill from your insurance company. It turns out you must pay a deductible for the privilege of collecting the peace of mind that you’ve already paid for. This cruel irony was brought home to us this past Sunday when we realized that our garage door was wide open and we had been robbed. As faithful insurance payers during the four years we’ve been married, we consulted our policy to see what help its good hands would provide. Enter the deductible - about a hundred dollars more than our estimated loss. Then it could have been a lot worse, you say. Yes, it could have been. And if it had, we might have actually been able to use our insurance.

But in the meantime, we will continue to pay our various insurance bills, warming ourselves in our blankie of security and enjoying the silver lining of this our most recent cloud. And what is the upside to an unclaimable burglary? In a word… karma.

You see, in addition to power tools and hydraulic jacks, our robbers took with them three 5-quart containers of motor oil and actually did us a favor. In the seven and a half months since we moved, we’ve been too lazy to recycle our used oil. After changing the oil, my husband has simply been putting the old oil back into the containers and setting them by the garage door to await the day when we’ll actually take them to be disposed of. So, it was with no small amount of pleasure that we realized these three containers were among the items stolen. And while it is our job to forgive the perpetrators of this crime, I don’t think any one can fault us when we imagine with a smile our robbers using our old oil and destroying their engine in the process.

Karma is a beautiful thing. And praise to the man who invented insurance… what a genius!