Why do people buy insurance even if they have the means to overcome the loss?
Insurance companies are businesses and their goal is to make money. It follows that if you are neither lucky nor unlucky, you will end up in the long run losing money by stipulating an insurance. I think this is a very simple concept that cannot be disputed, even though every time I try to explain this the other person starts saying how their mom/friend/aunt/etc saved a lot of money by buying insurance.
Now, it seems to me that insurance makes sense only if you cannot recover from a loss without it; for example, if you are a taxi driver with little to no savings it would make sense insuring your taxi against theft, because if you lose your taxi then you are pretty much screwed.
But why do rich people do it too? For example, a friend of mine who has tons of money saved up, insured his car for $1400, 4% of the value of the car, each year. According to a website I found much less than 0.25% of new vehicles are stolen during their lifetime, and in almost all occurrences the thief had access to the original key.
This person could buy another car at any moment without any money problems, so I don’t really see any point in insuring, especially with such a ridiculously high price compared to the extremely low risk.
Why do people do it? It’s just like gambling, but reversed. If you go to the casino long enough you’ll lose money; if you insure long enough, you also lose money.
Insurance isn’t a product designed to protect against financial loss. The product is designed to allow people to pay a small fee (the premium) for peace of mind. This allows the insured to feel as if their purchase was worthy (they see the potential of loss as a concern and the premiums small enough to allow them to not worry about having a loss).
Insurance companies will then seek out insurable risks where the perceived losses far out weight the actual losses (risk assessment).
So, you answer is that your friends are paying for peace of mind.
Ignoring that liability car insurance is usually a state mandated requirement and that all banks require full coverage, there are quite a few reasons to buy it.
No matter how much money you have, you can’t really guarantee that you can recover financially from an accident. Yes, you can buy a new car. But what happens if you are sued because the other driver died or is now in a long term coma? The legal costs alone would financially bury most people.
It’s even worse if you are rich. Let’s say someone rear ended you. If you had no insurance (again ignoring the legality here), you can bet their attorney would take a look at your considerable financial assets and do whatever it took to get as much of that as possible. The legal fees alone of defending yourself at trial would likely far outstrip everything else.
And that’s just one little situation.
Convenience. If you self-insure, then an accident means that you have to make arrangements to get the car towed, fixed, evaluated, etc. If you buy insurance, your insurer would prefer to do all that. They argue with the mechanic over prices, the lawyer over liability, etc.
And of course, rich people need more liability insurance than other people, not less. So part of that $1400 is probably money that your friend would have to pay regardless.
You’re making the assumption that a person would be aware, in advance, that they’d have enough resources to pay the costs of anything that might happen.
Second, you’re assuming the cost of insurance would outweigh what the person would have to pay out of pocket if they didn’t have insurance. In other words as an example, if the insurance premiums on my car are so high that it would be cheaper for me to replace it myself in cash then it might make sense, but how likely is that to be the case?
There’s a gambling adage that I think applies here – “Always bet with the house’s money”. Why would I put my own money on the line in the event of some event rather than pay for an insurance policy that takes care of it for me? That way, my costs are predictable and manageable – I pay the premiums and perhaps a deductible, and that’s it.
Insurance is a funny product. As you said, it is a little like gambling. When I buy term life insurance, I’m essentially betting that I’m going to die within the next 20 years, and the insurance company is betting that I’m not. I’m hoping to lose that bet!
Besides all of the reasons that other answers mentioned, I think part of the reason is psychological. As in my example, I’m setting up a kind of a win-win situation for myself here. Let’s go with car insurance, a less-morbid example than my first example. If I don’t get into a car accident, great! If I do get into a car accident, then the traumatic event is at least offset by the fact that the financial impact to me is minimal. Win-win.
In addition to stoj’s two good points I’ll add a couple more reasons:
3) In some situations there are secondary factors involved that can make it a good deal. These normally amount to cases where you can buy the insurance with pre-tax dollars but would have to pay the bills with post-tax dollars.
4) Insurance companies know much better what things should cost and often have negotiated rates. A rich person would generally be well-served to have health insurance for this very reason.
For a car, you’re typically compelled to carry insurance, and picking up “comprehensive” coverage (fire, theft, act of god) is normally cheap. If the car was purchased with a loan, the lender will stipulate that you carry comprehensive and collision insurance.
People buy insurance because it limits their liability. In the grand scheme of things, pricing in a fixed rate of loss every year (insurance premium + potential deductible) is appealing to many versus having to cover a catastrophic loss when your car is wrecked or stolen.
There are a couple of reasons that a person might choose to use insurance even if they could handle the financial loss if something went wrong.
They know their risk better than the insurance company. While it might seem odd at first glance that an individual can be better at assessing risk than a large company with thousands of actuaries. There are limits to the amount of knowledge that an insurance company can have or use to price their insurance products. For instance if you were a very aggressive driver but didn’t have any recent tickets or accidents because you were in college and didn’t have a car on a regular basis, but now you have a job and drive 30 miles to work every day. You know your risk is relatively high but the insurance company sees you as relatively low risk and aren’t able to price that extra risk into your premium.
Just because a person can survive financial after losing something like a car or a house doesn’t mean it isn’t desirable to pay a small price to mitigate that risk. If you are using your savings to pay for an emergency then that money needs to be semi liquid in case you need it limiting your investment options. Where as if you purchase insurance you pay a small amount of money to be able to invest the rest of your money. Liquidity is a big deal particularly if you are a small business and investing into your business where your money can make your more money but you may or may not be able to access that money very easily.
All investors have ultimately the same investment goal: maximize returns while limiting risk to an acceptable level. Of course we would love to maximize returns while minimizing risk, but in most cases if you want higher returns you must be willing to accept higher levels of risk. We must keep in mind that investors are humans, not computers. As such not everybody is willing to accept the same level of risk.
Insurance is simply a way to “buy down” risk. Yes, it reduces our overall gains (most of the time), but so do bonds vs stocks (most of the time). And yet who among us doesn’t have bonds in our portfolio? Insurance is yet another way to balance risk and return.
Your basic point is correct; the savvy move is to use insurance only to cover losses that would be painful or catastrophic for you. Otherwise, self-insure.
In the specific example of car insurance, you may be missing that it doesn’t only cover replacement of the car, it also covers liability, which is a hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars risk. The liability coverage may well be legally required; it may also be required as a base layer if you want to get a separate umbrella policy up to millions in liability. So you have to be very rich before this insurance stops making sense.
In the US at least you can certainly buy car insurance that doesn’t cover loss of the car, or that has a high deductible. And in fact, if you can afford to self-insure up to a high deductible, on average as you say that should be a good idea.
Same is true of most kinds of insurance, a high deductible is best as long as you can afford it, unless you know you’ll probably file a claim. (Health insurance in particular is weird in many ways, and one is that you often can estimate whether you’ll have claims.)
On our auto policy, the liability and uninsured motorist coverage is about 60% of the cost while damage to the car coverage is 40%. I’m sure this varies a lot depending on the value of your cars and how much you drive and driving record, etc. On an aging car the coverage for the car itself should get cheaper and cheaper since the car is worth less, while liability coverage would not necessarily get cheaper.