Thread: Anybody got a combined home and contents / home business policy?

Have you reached out to AAMI?
From my experience with AAMI, they are not a budget home insurance company but they do offer home business insurance. They do have clauses that may prevent them from wanting to take you on as a potential home business client. Eg manufacturing kids toys is one of those areas.

So would recommend contacting AAMI (and a few companies) and getting quotes based on your personal circumstances, as Business insurance is unique to what you do, and the amount of cover you wish to take out.

Originally Posted by tonzeyd

Have you reached out to AAMI?
From my experience with AAMI, they are not a budget home insurance company but they do offer home business insurance. They do have clauses that may prevent them from wanting to take you on as a potential home business client. Eg manufacturing kids toys is one of those areas.

So would recommend contacting AAMI (and a few companies) and getting quotes based on your personal circumstances, as Business insurance is unique to what you do, and the amount of cover you wish to take out.

We've had home and contents insurance with AAMI for many, many years.

Recently I've spent several hours on several occasions on the phone with AAMI home and business divisions and received conflicting advice, and advice that conflicts with the terms of our current policy.

The biggest problem is that our current home policy is a replacement policy with accommodation paid during rebuild, but the business policy offers neither.

Already had our insurance broker look around and there's not much available.

Have a look at this thread,

Insurance concerns

Originally Posted by Mobyturns

Have a look at this thread,

Insurance concerns

Yeah, that really cheered me up!

Apart from I'll give QBE a go.

I made a living for 35 years dealing with these sorts of issues including, to my discredit, several years working for a major life insurance company.

On the basis of considerable experience on both sides of the insurance fence, I know that insurance claims will be assessed with a view to avoiding them where possible. I could demolish in court much of the quite wrong advice I've received from AAMI, but it's their game and I have to play by their rules if I want a claim admitted at the outset. I don't want to spend my and my wife's remaining years attempting to conduct difficult legal proceedings with nowhere to live after my house has burnt down and possibly in the terminal stages of dementia or some other disabling illness by the time it reaches court for final determination.

As an example of the sorts of ba$tards we're dealing with, when I was working for the life insurance company a rejected claim fed up the line to me at a level where I could usually determine it in the early 1980s. A bloke died after a long and increasingly miserable illness which nowadays would probably be identified as a buruli ulcer, leaving a widow and kids with nothing much except the insurance proceeds. The claims clowns rejected the claim on the basis that as he had died in the first twelve months of a new policy it was somehow suspicious and wrong and virtually a fraudulent claim, fraudsters in their opinion apparently getting incurable illnesses and dying just to defraud life insurance companies. The claim therefore had to be rejected. The very, very, very short version of what became a ridiculous internal corporate battle between the claims clowns and me is that it ended up one level above me with the CEO. I advised him that the company was obliged to pay the claim under the terms of the policy and the representations made by the selling agent when selling the policy. I pointed out that the issue was receiving some local publicity in the large regional town where the dead bloke and his family lived, courtesy of the very honest and decent sales agent who sold the policy and had become an advocate for the widow and kids, and that some news / current affairs shows were sniffing around and that this issue threatened to get wider media exposure and wipe out a year or two of the company's marketing budget with adverse publicity, not to mention significant penalties much higher than the policy amount under the consumer protection provisions of the Trade Practices Act. The CEO immediately directed that the claim be paid forthwith. The point to be noted wasn't that he was so much swayed by the policy's terms as by the corporate and marketing damage that could be done. It was a decision about what was best for the company, not the terms of the policy.

I, as was my duty, of course acted in the best interests of the company by giving perfectly correct and objective advice. It was purely coincidental that it helped out the widow and kids.

AAMI are a no-go if you run anything that could conceivably be regarded as a business. We run cattle on 20 acres as primary producers (and have separate liability insurance), but they won't take that on so we have a farm policy with another (more expensive) insurer.

The experience of having to claim for total loss of home and contents after the 2019/20 bushfires really opened my eyes about insurers. We did get full payout for the house and contents at insured value (having been paying premiums on those valuations for the past 15 years, with never a single claim.....), BUT only because we had used an insurance broker and they went into bat for us. The list of dirty tricks the insurance company tried on is extensive, but at every stage our experienced broker was able to "put them straight" on how things were going to pan out. Without that expert knowledge working for us, we'd have been stuffed with insufficient funds to rebuild. As the previous poster has stated, insurance companies are not your friends - everything they do to "help" after you put in a claim is aimed at winding back what they will have to pay out. Our claims were resolved fast thanks to our broker, which put us ahead of the long list of others who had lost homes and were looking for builders - some neighbours were still wrangling with insurers 2 years later, and one only just completed rebuild over 3 years after the fires. Needless to say, our broker has our insurance business for as long as they want it.....

419 how big a business are you thinking? Will it require an ABN? if not then I would question it being a business and not a hobby.

Would be interesting as to what they classify a business

My personal opinion only, due to past dealings with AAMI I would not insure my dog kennel with them.

Originally Posted by Tonyz

419 how big a business are you thinking? Will it require an ABN? if not then I would question it being a business and not a hobby.

The hobby / business issue applies in taxation and other areas, but not home insurance where it is governed by the policy which, believe it or not, is written by the insurer for the insurer's commercial benefit.

Originally Posted by Tonyz

Would be interesting as to what they classify a business

Business definition from my AAMI policy is "any activity specifically undertaken for the purpose of earning an income".

The usual legal definition of a business is along the lines that it is an enterprise carried out with a view to profit. Profit is what's left after all the costs of running the business.

"Income" is not defined in my policy, so it has its usual meaning which involves payments for the sale of one's labour or returns from investments such as rent or shares.

It follows that, for example, people working from home for an external employer have lost the protection of their policy by engaging in an "activity specifically undertaken for the purpose of earning an income". So, on a strict interpretation of the policy, has a self-funded retiree engaged in low level share trading or a landlord managing the rental property from their home insured by AAMI.

Such an absurdly wide definition of business, which is contrary to what most business and ordinary people would consider to be a business, gives AAMI an extraordinarily wide opportunity to deny claims, regardless of whether or not the "business" activity was in any way related to the loss.

Originally Posted by China

My personal opinion only, due to past dealings with AAMI I would not insure my dog kennel with them.

My personal opinion, only due to past dealings with lots of insurers on both sides of the fence in personal injury, property and motor vehicle issues is that they're all ba$tards.

In fairness to insurers, which is not something I find easy to do, if you have a straightforward claim it'll usually be processed without any trouble.

It's when the claims clowns decide in their infinite wisdom that there's some reason to question the claim that the trouble starts.

Or they're just unreasonable, grasping prick$.

I had two cars written off for hail damage in the 2011 Xmas Day hail storms in Melbourne. Identical AUII Falcon XR6 and 220kw XR8, parked side by side in the storm. Both insured with AAMI. AAMI gave me whatever for the XR6 as I didn't want to keep it. AAMI had a deal where I could buy the wreck for something like 10 to 20% of the assessed loss, which I wanted to do with the XR8. The XR8 was insured for an agreed value which I forget but which was well below market value at the time but, as usual with insurers, the most that AAMI reckoned it was worth. The assessor says it's a write off and I say I'll buy it for whatever the price was that was the percentage 10 to 20% or whatever price of the agreed value. Oh, No, says the assessor this is worth way more than the agreed value and I can't let you have it for that. So when the car is mine it's worth, say, $15,000 in AAMI's view but when it's theirs it's worth about 50% more. Prick$, the lot of them.