Today I went to the Choosi web site and decided to call them to get an insurance quote to see if they were competitive against all other companies. After entering my personal details including name, date of birth, sex, email address, phone number and how much cover I wanted, the quoting system advised me that I would soon be receiving a call from a person to discuss my needs. For the record I am 54 years of age, male and a non-smoker.

Within 5 minutes I received a call from a pleasant young lady who proceeded to confirm my details and enquired if I would like to proceed with the application. Of course, I said yes. She then went onto advise me that Choosi was owned by Hollard insurance and the only insurance companies that she could give me a quote on were Real, Hollard Budget Direct & Guardian.  If I wanted a quote for AIA or Asteron she would have to put me through to another person.

I chose to continue with her and she then gave me the costs for $300,000 of insurance cover, which was $119.76 per month with Hollard and $113.25 with Real.  She also mentioned that these companies were given 4 star ratings by the customers.  (Now I have been in the insurance industry for 26 years and I have never heard of customers giving ratings on an insurance company).  After choosing which company I wanted to go with (Real Insurance) she proceeded to ask me lifestyle and health questions.  I baulked at this as I believed that there would be no medicals and would automatically be accepted. Now from watching all these nauseating commercials on the tele I believed that acceptance was automatic but not so. She told me that they needed to assess, by asking these questions, whether I would be accepted at normal rates, loaded rates or declined. Okay I thought I will go ahead with the application and see what happens from here.

After answering a few lifestyle questions such as; do I do anything that is dangerous in my job, she got to the medical questions.   On disclosing that I have had a stent inserted into my heart two years ago, the application stopped and I was told that I would be declined for cover.    She then proceeded to offer me “accident only” cover or funeral insurance cover which I politely declined.

Okay the kicker here is that I ran the quotes myself through my comparator software and every other company was cheaper than the quotes I received from Choosi.  The cheapest quote was $72.16, or $41.09 per month cheaper ($493.08 a year).  This makes a mockery of the offer of 10% of the premium refunded after the first year.

The message: If you fall for this advertising without checking out cover with a Financial Adviser you will be doing yourself out of your own hard-earned money.