More than 90% of people in Malaysia are either under-insured or have no insurance to their name. This is a distressing figure, but if you’re feeling like you belong in this category and want to change things, you have to know the different kinds of insurance you might be looking at.
In this day and age, you can get some insurance policies that even cover various different areas in a singular product, which may or may not suit your needs better. This aside, let’s look at the different types of insurance available to a Malaysian consumer.
Motor Insurance
If you own a car, you have a motor insurance policy by law as long as you have valid roadtax. It’s one of the requirements in our country that anyone driving a vehicle on the road has valid insurance to cover the cost of damage – in a third party capacity at the very least. A third party insurance policy covers any party except yourself, while comprehensive insurance also includes coverage for your own vehicle.
Life Insurance
This might be the first thing you think of when someone starts talking about insurance policies. The morbid nature of these plans might make them tough to discuss, but death is a reality that everyone faces at some point or another, and the purpose of life insurance is to ensure that your loved ones and dependents don’t face sudden financial shortfall in the event of your untimely demise.
Health Insurance
Another incredibly popular form of insurance is health insurance, and as the name suggests it exists to cover your medical bills in the form of a medical card. This form of insurance starts to become important if you go for elective, complex surgeries or require very expensive treatments in a private hospital. Medical cards are now extremely important to Malaysians as medical costs soar higher by the year at an alarming rate.
Critical Illness Insurance
Critical Illness Insurance payout is a one off sum and is essentially a form of income protection that immediately pays you out if you are diagnosed with critical illnesses – whether that’s a heart attack, or even strokes and cancer. This insurance is a necessity as the lump sum payment helps sustain your lifestyle on your road to recovery.
Personal Accident Insurance
This may seem like a bit of a strange insurance to have, but did you know that compensation for injuries, disabilities, and death caused by violent, accidental, external, and visible events are separate from life and illness or health insurance policies? There are specific plans and policies surrounding these events, which cover a larger scope of costs that you may incur and the resultant problems you may face after the incident.
Home Insurance
A lesser known form of insurance is one for your home, which covers damages to the structure of the house itself including things like the roof, walls, fixtures and fittings, and the garage – usually with regards to damage caused by explosions, lightning, or fire. Some insurance policies may also include coverage for the actual items you have in your house in the event that they are stolen or broken, separate to damage incurred on the house.
Travel Insurance
For the last two years, travel has perhaps been the lowest priority on anyone’s list – but one of the more modern forms of insurance is travel insurance. Usually packaged together with your flights and accommodation, travel insurance is there to protect you if your luggage goes missing in transit or is stolen, as well as providing emergency medical evacuation and repatriation if circumstances are especially dire. These policies vary greatly in size and scale, from singular trip policies to year round policies, and single person to entire family coverage.
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