Insist on Receipt

This is something that is often overlooked by investors/policyholders. I cannot overemphasized enough how crucial is the statement of receipt/sales transcipts/advice slips when it comes to dealing with your personal finance services or products.

The difference between getting a receipt for every payment and not getting one could mean huge financial losses to you.

Let me illustrate one case to bring up the importance of this simple act of insisting receipt upon payment and why you should be practising it at all cost.

A friend of mine, Josephine has been holding 3 insurance policies for the past 10 years. She’s been paying her premium faithfully to the Company (or so she thought) from her hard-earned money every year, without fail. Josephine is a working mum, and her commitment is rather on the high side. With a school-going daughter, every penny she gets from her job counts.

She called me up a few weeks back and she suspects that there’s some discrepancies with her insurance policies. Actually, she was planning for her medical health care benefits, and she decided to review and update all her policies. This is when she suspected the premium she’s been handing over to the agent has not reached the Company.

The agent did not responded to her queries after a few attempts, hence the purpose of her calling me. With a few phone calls, I was able to retrieve some basic information on her policies’ status.

And I was disgusted at the worms I dug out…

Of the 3 policies, one is running on APL (APL stands for Automatic Premium Loan, which means premiums is paid using money generated from the Policy itself, which reduces the cash value of the policy), one is lapsed (which means no longer in effect, but revivable) and one is terminated (which means it has been lapsed for a number of years, and is NOT revivable).

One of the questions that strucked my mind was why didn’t she get any reminder notice or any documents from the company. It was later revealed that the agent has schemingly changed the mailing address to the agent’s own address.

And the most important question that I had to ask- “Why hadn’t you asked for a payment receipt after so many years of making your payments?” The answer was not very surprising- she said she trusted the agent, as they’ve been very good friends. Trust, is something that becomes subjective when you attached it to monetary terms.

Of course, all these could have been easily remedied and avoided if she’d insisted on receipt.

To take it one step further, I would advocate a few more things which you as a consumer can do to protect yourself:-

1) use your credit card to make payments
2) use auto debit or GIRO facilities to make payments
3) use online banking to make payments
4) use cheque rather than cash when going thru an intermediary/agent
5) last but not least, insist on getting receipts if you still prefer to pay cash thru your intermediary/agent

These are the steps you can protect yourself against fraudulent agents, and why give them the benefit of doubt? You have nothing to gain and so much to lose from that doubt you gave. With all these modern banking facilities, there’s not much excuse for you not to utilize the convenience, unless you seriously wants to gauge the “trust” with your cash.

I am not implying you should not trust your agent, it’s just that you have to protect yourself at all times, especially when it comes to your hard-earned money. There’s a reason why when you are paying at the cashier, they have a note “Insist On Your Resist” and some even add “If Not, You Get a Free Drink On The House!”

So, check on your policy today and make sure your payment made it to the intended party.

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