Insurance Doesn't Make Sense If You Have Savings

February 12th, 2011
insurance, money
Living in an apartment, it might make sense to get renter's insurance. We'd pay something monthly, and then if something bad happened the insurance company would pay for our stuff. The alternative is not to get insurance, and pay for stuff out of savings if needed. Insurance companies make money. They do this by charging people as a whole more in premiums than they get back in payments [1]. So as long as we can afford to re-purchase all our stuff out of savings, insurance has negative value to us.

[1] Health insurance is different because the company does collective bargaining to decrease how much the providers charge for their services.

Comment via: facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Linkpost for July

Effective Altruism

via Thing of Things July 3, 2026

Agentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes on agentic coding from Galapagos Island

I've been using AI fairly heavily since last November and the whole thing is a funny experience. An agent will do something that, if a human did it, you'd immediately fire them. My reaction, of course, is to act as if this is great and spin up a t…

via Posts on July 3, 2026

Variable fonts aren't universally supported

I make a lot of webpages. I also use Lockdown Mode on iOS and MacOS for a bit of extra security. Sometimes I realize that I forgot to test on Safari and it looks like crap, or I test and don’t notice that there’s been a problem for months (as was the case…

via Home June 27, 2026

more     (via openring)