Yesterday my wife received notice that her life insurance quarterly premium had not been paid. I pulled up the bank website, and it shows it had been paid. She called the insurance company. They want proof they received it. She said WTF, I have proof I paid it. Nope, not good enough. And insurance bitch will not cooperate in any way to see if it was posted improperly, as I paid my premium the same way the same day and it was received. Talk to the bank, she says. Got hold of the main bank customer service. This has to be attended to in person, by appointment only. Call your branch. Called the branch. The earliest appointment is Monday, 10:30am. Her insurance gets cancelled Friday. I'm not overly concerned as, at our age and with our resources, the small policies were just to cover immediate debt in the event one of us dies, and we could cover it. But I wants my money back.

A photocopy of the check should suffice. This is something the bank branch manager should handle. Life insurance policies typically have grace periods. If this does not work you have your State Insurance Commissioner. I would try and refrain from commenting on the obvious incomptence in the insurance company's bookkeeping department.

This reminds me of an instance where USAA tried to force me to prove our son didn't have a full driver license yet by working with the state DOT. The default position for many banks and insurance companies seems to be that any issue is your problem to prove to their satisfaction.

For USAA, demanding a supervisor finally got me someone that knew how things worked and they took care of the issue. There was nothing I could have done myself working with the state DOT, as the issue was internal to USAA.

In this case, zsmichael's recommendation to get proof of payment may be sufficient and to contact the state commissioner. I'd also be tempted to demand a supervisor at the insurance company and have them explain how they receive payments and at what point you need to prove what.

Where’s your agent in all this? I’d get his or hers ass in the middle of this fecal show muy pronto.

That’s what commissions are for.

Licensed agent here, and I have a non-resident KY license.

By law you have a 30 day grace period to bring it current and plenty of companies give you 30 more on top of that. And in KY there's a law that non-contestability transfers to the new company if you switch after your policy is two years old. So you may be a few years older and thus it's more expensive. But, if you have a non-contestable policy and replace it, you still have a non-contestable policy.

BTW, all calls to insurance companies are recorded, so make sure you utter a few catch phrases like, "fraud, dept. of insurance, grace period, complaint" etc. That gets attention.

The bank manager fixed his end in about ten minutes and printed out the proof I needed. He is also licensed as an insurance agent in KY and he provided me with a copy of the reg saying there is a 90 day grace period. He also provided me with a contact in the insurance commission office in case there are further problems. Upon reflection, I believe this was a "holiday week" problem-not the recording keeping error, but I believe they were short staffed during the holiday week and, from what I could hear in the background on the call, I think the representative was in a work from home situation. We'll see Monday. Also fortunately, my wife worked in Accounts Receivable/Accounts Payable for 20 years, and is a record keeping whiz. When we have a telephone contact, she always even gets the full name of the person she speaks to. Once upon a time she got the remainder of our mortgage forgiven when B of A screwed up and tried to foreclose on us. Took her about two weeks, but she got a letter of apology, forgiveness for the several thousand dollars remaining on the loan, and a letter to the credit agencies explaining the error and removing the issue from our ratings.

I'm glad it all worked out.

Be sure to get clarification on the grace period. Each company and/or state may and will differ. A grace period may have certain requirements. For example, most will have a 30 days reinstatement without requirement while outside of that window may require a complete re-underwriting.

In fact, I know my company will reinstate up to a year....but after 30 days, you will have to be re-underwritten.

Just a FYI for the future or anyone else interested in this.

Got thru to the insurance company today. Lo and behold, they didn't properly apply the payment! What a bunch, really gives me faith they'll treat my survivors well when they file a claim. Doesn't much matter, it's term life and in a couple of years I'll pretty much age out anyway.

I have a co-worker who wrote a policy on a guy who died and his family didn't find out about the policy until eight years after his death. But the policy was in effect when he died, so they filed a claim and it paid. I regularly have customers' payments bounce due to an account being closed or frozen and I can never find them or their beneficiaries. I often wonder if they died or when I'll hear about a claim.

Bureaucrats are the same everywhere. I owed several hundred dollars in income tax to the state of Oregon this year. I sent them a check in early April, and in June I got a notice that I still owed them. Checked the amount they said I owed, yep it was the same as the check I wrote. Checked with the bank, yep the check had come back endorsed and cashed by the state of Oregon. So I called the revenue department and talked to a woman there. She checked and said that "somebody" had mistakenly applied my payment to NEXT year's taxes. I wouldn't have thought that was even possible. She got it straightened out all right, but damn.