Be careful of anyone cold calling to sell you a financial product

I am always wary of people cold calling me trying to sell me financial products. I thought this was a practice slowly dying out until recently.

I’m always wary of people cold calling me trying to sell financial products.

I thought this practice was dead and buried, particularly following the recent financial services royal commission. That was until recently.

At the end of March I signed up to my health insurer for another 12 months. It’s an expense I don’t want to think about again for a year.

But just this week — less than one week after re-signing I got a cold call from them trying to sell me another type of insurance, income protection insurance.

I politely said no as soon as I realised what the woman on the other end of the phone was trying to flog me.

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She asked why I didn’t want to pursue life insurance with them.

I told her: “I don’t need to explain my reasons but I’m not interested”.

To be truthful, I have good insurance coverage within my super fund and don’t want another product in addition to this.

But my insurer wasn’t giving up on me just yet.

I soon received a letter in the mail from them again offering me income protection insurance.

Upselling in my view rarely ends well.

I try and avoid it like the plague.

Be wary of any businesses cold calling you to get you to buy financial products.

Financial service providers love signing customers up to a suite of products so they can squeeze as much cash out of you as possible.

But I’ve always adopted the approach to cherry-pick my financial products.

I love to spread the love and hand-pick the best deal from each individual provider, whether it be a daily transaction account, credit card, home loan, super account or insurer.

Life insurers have come under pressure to ditch cold calling, and Freedom Insurance was one of the companies named and shamed at the royal commission.

Outbound calls have proven critical to many direct life insurance distributors and the commission found a “vast majority” of sales were signed up this way.

Perhaps health insurers can get away with doing this, for now, because they weren’t involved in the royal commission.

Regardless of what the product is, be careful of someone ringing you trying to get you to sign up over the phone.

As dull as it sounds, always read the terms and conditions. These call centre workers rely on getting you to sign up on the spot in a rush without really knowing what you are getting yourself into.

And it doesn’t stop at insurance.

I seem get a call every few weeks from an energy provider trying to get me to switch across to them.

Again, this is something I will do in my own time and not when I’m called out of the blue.

Be alert but not alarmed when you get these types of calls, emails or letters and never rush in.

Always take the time to work out if it is a good deal or not because at the end of the day it’s you who will be paying.

@sophieelsworth