Funeral Insurer TAL Kills Off Husband

Hi Scott,

Thank you for taking on Bill and Wendy’s funeral insurance nightmare last week. My mum died last year. That’s when I discovered she’d been paying funeral insurance for decades – I think she paid for her funeral twenty times over. She wanted “a very simple affair”. Instead, the insurance company got rich. How many other families are discovering this after their parents die?

Tash

Hi Tash,

I’m sorry for the loss of your mum, and your mum’s loss.

How many elderly people are stuck in this trap?

The insurers won’t tell us, but I suspect it’s in the (many) thousands.

This week Wendy called me in a bit of a flap.

“Scott, I just received an email from TAL telling me how sad they are that Bill died.”

Bill has not one but two terminal diagnoses.

Now imagine your wife of 60 years opening that email.

Getting paid out the benefit automatically triggered a “we care deeply” templated email from TAL – the same company that’s been bleeding them dry for years with a funeral insurance policy they should never have sold in the first place.

Still, when big companies are this stupid, you have to laugh.

“Wendy, please go give Bill a prod for me … make sure the old bugger is still with us”, I joked.

She put down the phone for a moment.

“Yes, he’s watching a movie. Very much alive”, she laughed.

Big companies do dumb things. Their systems and processes – and profit targets – blind them from behaving like decent humans. They forget that those profits come from someone’s scared grandparent. 

TAL don’t need their money.They just want it.