I’m annoyed with myself as I write this. I have previously mentioned on my blog that insurance is not my strong suit. It’s probably the weakest part of our personal finances. Reason being I don’t review our policies and plans often enough because they don’t get used often.
Other than the monthly or yearly insurance premiums to be paid, I don’t usually take a closer look at the coverage or even review it until something happens. Which is a stupid way to approach insurance. Because the likely outcome is that I probably won’t have the necessary coverage until I need it.
Happened early last month when we found out the baby will be delivered prematurely with possible health complications that might require a stay in the NICU. And we didn’t buy maternity insurance during the pregnancy. I only found out after getting back to work that I actually have corporate maternity insurance.
This time round, the mistake I made was with my own health insurance. Many years ago, I did a review of my insurance policies and upgraded my health insurance to a NTUC Enhanced IncomeShield – Preferred integrated shield plan. The entire insurance premium is usually paid yearly from my CPF – Medisave Account without any cash outlay.
Because the whole process is automatic, I don’t bother to review my integrated shield plan in detail. However, the important thing I didn’t pay attention to is that my insurance premium rises as I get older. Especially with the increase in MediShield Life premiums. At some point, I should have been expecting a cash outlay.
Apparently, that’s this year and I was not aware of it. As a result, my health insurance lapsed in Oct 2019 and I had no idea. I had changed my residential address and didn’t update NTUC Income so I didn’t receive the notification letters mailed to me. I plan to call NTUC Income to find out why they did not call, message or email me about it. Maybe they did and I just ignored all those notifications.
This is so dumb on my part. Can you imagine if I had an existing medical condition and lose my insurance coverage because of this error? Maybe I might have been more careful in the first place but there’s no excuse for letting this happen. While I still have corporate medical insurance in place, it’s a function of my job and is easily lost.
I would like to think having a baby changed my life so much that I lost track of my personal finances. But it’s not. I had time for this and just didn’t notice it. In fact, the only reason why I picked this up is from my updating of the NTUC Income online login details (NRIC to email address). I was like, why is my health insurance policy status showing up as Inactive?
The next thing I’m doing after sorting this out is to look at my wife’s health insurance status and make sure her policy status is still Active. After that, I’m going to look at buying medical insurance for the baby. It’s so easy to get overwhelmed by life that you lose track of what you are doing, what you should be doing and what you have to do.