If your business involves shipping goods locally or overseas, whether inland or across the ocean, you need to realize that the moment those goods leave the door, they change hands many, many times. , and it is not known what can happen.

To protect your assets and your business, you need to have marine insurance. But how to choose the right one? Here are some pros and cons:

NOT TO DO

1. Don’t confuse marine insurance with boat insurance. Boat insurance protects watercraft and their passengers. It’s like car insurance, except the car floats on water.

Marine insurance is a completely different banana. Despite its name, it is not limited to protecting waterborne cargo. It also protects the cargo transported on dry land, in addition to protecting the vessel carrying the cargo.

This is why there is such a thing as “dry” sea, for cargo transported overland, as well as “wet” sea, for cargo shipped via actual ships.

two. Don’t be tied down in your application form. Don’t hide relevant information either. There’s a fine line between the two: lying on your form means you deliberately entered the wrong information. Withholding information means that you were not required to disclose the information, but you know that disclosing it would have adversely affected your policy.

Either way, if you are found to have lied or withheld relevant information, it will most likely void your policy, defeating the purpose for which you obtained the insurance in the first place.

3. Don’t break your warranty. In insurance law, the guarantee is essential for the execution of the contract. If breached, the offending party may terminate the contract in addition to claiming damages.

A common implied warranty in marine insurance is the seaworthiness (or roadworthiness) of the boat.

Please note that if a guarantee is breached, it will not help the insured to remedy the guarantee; the policy will remain null and void in spite of everything.

So before buying a policy, make sure you know all the guarantees included and make sure you don’t breach any of them. Which brings us to our first do…

behind

1. Read the fine print. While the fine print can be tedious to read, we all know, some from painful experience, ignoring it is like parking under a construction site: it’s only a matter of time before something hard and heavy hits you over the head, and it’s it may not. live to regret

The fact is, unless you’re a first grader just learning to read, it won’t take you five minutes to read the details of the contract you’re signing. (It doesn’t matter if it feels like an hour, it really isn’t.)

The fine print will tell you the details of what you’re paying for, what rights you may have that you may not have been told about, and what conditions are not covered by your policy, and what actions will void your policy. . For example, improperly packed cargo is often not covered. Neither are dangerous items like fuels, firearms, and chemicals. Others may not cover food, wood and animals. There may also be sailing limits which, if exceeded, will void your policy.

two. Compare policy offers. And don’t just rely on price.

Perhaps the reason that policy is so cheap is because it only covers actual value, which is the value of your insured item at the time it was lost, and this includes depreciation, so you’ll probably end up getting much less than what i expected. expected.

On the other hand, that other policy may cost more, but it insures your item for the amount you had agreed to (agreed value), on paper, so when the item is lost, you are compensated for the exact amount you expect. , which will allow you to immediately replace the lost item with a new one.

What happens with the causes of loss covered by the policy? No-show policies only cover specific types of loss and may not cover force majeure events. On the other hand, maybe they will.

Read the fine print so you know exactly what you’re paying for. Just because it’s the cheapest marine insurance policy doesn’t mean it’s the best. And if you are in business, you should know that you should only invest in the best ones, or suffer losses later on.