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Home › Services › Document Guides › Insurance Portability Documentation

You are not moving a product. You are moving time.

Everybody describes this as transferring a policy, and the description is what causes the trouble. A policy is a one-year contract and it is not portable — it simply ends. What travels is the credit for the years you have already run, and that credit is the entire reason this exercise exists. The asset is years, not paper. Which leads to the hardest fact here: no amount of money produces elapsed time. A premium buys a cover today; it cannot buy a position that exists only because somebody kept something running for a long while. So the thing worth protecting most carefully is the one that never had a price. Then the misunderstanding we see on almost every file. This is two questions, and people merge them into one. First, will the new company accept you. Second, if they do, will your years come with you. Those are separate decisions, made on separate grounds, and a yes to one is not a yes to the other. Next, the part that does actual damage. This is a sequence, not a transaction, and it cannot be run backwards. If the old cover ends before the new one is confirmed, there is a period with nothing in it — and what you were protecting was never the document, it was the unbroken run. One day of nothing can end what took years to build, and it does not come back. So: never close before you open. Then the document the whole position rests on: the first form you ever filled in, because continuity is measured against what was declared at the beginning — and it is, almost without exception, the one paper nobody kept. And the quiet one: most broken runs were nobody’s decision at all, but a premium debit that stopped working when a bank account changed. Our limits: we do not say whether to move, which company to choose, whether you will be accepted, or what will count as continuous — and we print no period, premium or product anywhere.

From ₹1,499 7 – 20 days Years, not paper Never close before you open
We have had the same family cover for about eleven years and the service has got steadily worse, so we want to move to another company. Somebody told us there is a process for this where we do not lose anything, but also warned us to be careful. I want to understand what we are actually risking, because eleven years feels like it ought to count for something and I do not want to find out afterwards that it did not.Eleven years counts for a great deal, and your instinct about it is the right one, so let me start by naming the thing precisely because the common description of this gets it wrong in a way that matters. People call this transferring a policy. It is not. A policy of this kind is a one-year contract, and a one-year contract cannot be transferred anywhere — it simply ends when it ends. So nothing you are holding is going to move. What moves, if this is done properly, is the credit for the eleven years. That is the asset. The paper in your file is just the current year, and the current year is replaceable at any time by anybody. The eleven years are not. So already the shape of the risk changes. You are not worried about losing a document. You are worried about losing a position that took eleven years to accumulate, and keeping those two apart is what the rest of what I say depends on. Let me put the hardest fact next, because everything practical follows from it. No amount of money produces elapsed time. If you walked into any company tomorrow with a cheque, you could buy a cover that starts tomorrow. There is nothing you could pay to be treated as somebody who has had one for eleven years. Which means the asset we are handling cost you nothing in particular — you built it by doing nothing except not stopping — and it is also completely unbuyable. In my experience that combination is exactly why people are casual with it. Things that were never invoiced do not feel like property. Now the specific misunderstanding I would most like to remove, because I see it on nearly every file of this kind and it is what the person warning you was probably gesturing at. You are thinking of this as one question. It is two, and they are decided separately, by different people, on different grounds. The first question is whether the new company will take you at all. The second is whether, if they take you, your eleven years will be respected. Read those again and notice that the answer to one tells you nothing reliable about the other. And people get this wrong in both directions. Some assume that being accepted means everything carried, and discover otherwise much later. Others assume that because the years would carry, acceptance was a formality, and start acting on that before anybody has confirmed anything. The second error is the dangerous one, and here is why. This is a sequence, not a transaction. A transaction you can do in any order and sort out afterwards. A sequence has an order, and this one cannot be run backwards. If your old cover ends before the new one is actually in place, then there is a period with nothing in it. And what you have been protecting for eleven years is not a document, it is an unbroken run. A single day of nothing can end that. Not reduce it. End it. And nothing you do afterwards brings it back, because the only thing that produces years is years. So if you take one instruction from this entire conversation, let it be this one, and I would put it above everything else I am going to say. Never close before you open. Not after you have applied. Not after somebody at a call centre sounded positive. Not after you have paid something. Confirmed, in writing, with the position on your eleven years actually stated in that writing — and only then is the old one allowed to lapse. I have seen people end an old cover because a new one was, in their reasonable belief, arranged, and the belief was based on a conversation. Now the document side, and this is the part where I can actually be useful to you. The most valuable piece of paper in your file is not your current policy. It is the very first form you ever filled in, from eleven years ago, when you first took the cover. The reason is that continuity is measured against what was declared at the beginning. If a new form now says something different from what the old form said then, that is precisely the point at which years get lost. And I will tell you in advance what I expect to happen when we look for it: you will not have it. Almost nobody does. The current year is in a drawer and the first year was eleven house-moves and three laptops ago. That is normal and it is usually recoverable — it tends to sit with the company, or with whoever sold it to you, or in an old email, or in the first-year pack rather than the current one. But it has to be found before any new form is filled in, not after. Which brings me to the thing I would most like to talk you out of, and it is the most natural thing in the world to do. Do not fill the new form from memory. The risk is not that anybody is dishonest. The risk is that the same facts, described by the same person eleven years apart, come out in different words. Two documents that do not agree is what costs the years, and nobody involved did anything wrong. We lay the old answers beside what the new form asks, line by line, precisely so that nothing drifts. One more thing about your situation specifically, since you said family. A cover that includes several people is treated by families as one object with one history, and it is not. Each person on it has their own history and their own set of earlier answers, and each one has to be reconciled on their own. That is more work rather than harder work, but it is work that cannot be done collectively. Then there is what we usually find when we build the year-by-year list, and I raise it because you described eleven years as though it were a straight line. It often is not. A renewal paid a few days late. One year taken with a different company and then back. An insurer that merged and changed its name so that your run looks like two runs. And the commonest of all, by a wide margin: a premium on automatic debit, from a bank account that got closed or changed, which silently stopped working. Nothing anywhere announces that a debit has started failing. Most of the broken runs I deal with were nobody’s decision. They were a bank account change that nobody connected to an insurance policy. Which gives you the one habit worth adopting regardless of whether you move: after any change to a bank account, check that the premium still goes out. That single check prevents the commonest way this asset is destroyed, and it takes a minute. The other half of the habit is to keep the first year’s papers somewhere separate from the current year’s, because the opening year is the one with the weight in it, and it is the one that gets binned. Now where I stop, and on this subject my limits are tighter than usual, deliberately. I will not tell you whether moving is a good idea. I will not tell you which company to go to, and I will not compare one against another — that is advisory work that requires a licence, I do not hold one, and I am not going to look as though I do. I will not predict whether you will be accepted, because that is the company’s own decision on its own criteria and a guess from me would be nothing but false comfort. And I am not going to discuss, record or ask about anybody’s circumstances or history beyond the dates on the documents. Those questions go to a licensed insurance adviser or broker, and the acceptance question goes to the company itself. What I do is the file and the calendar. I trace the original form and the first-year pack and put copies in your hands. I build the eleven-year history with dates against it and tell you honestly whether the run is unbroken, including anything you did not know was in it. I list each person on the cover separately with their own history. I lay the earlier answers beside what the new form asks. And I write the sequence down with its dates in a diary, because the hard parts of this work are nearly all calendar entries rather than calls to make — which is unusual, and it is why, almost uniquely among the files that cross my desk, being orderly is close to the entire craft here.

What this guide covers

  1. What actually moves
  2. Not the policy — the time
  3. The asset is years
  4. Why “product” is the wrong word
  5. The question worth asking
  6. What is precious here, paper or time?
  7. What the credit actually is
  8. How it accumulates
  9. And why it cannot be bought
  10. Two questions, not one
  11. Will they take you
  12. Will your time come with you
  13. Decided separately
  14. A yes to one is not a yes to the other
  15. Which way people get it wrong
  16. The optimistic reading
  17. And the pessimistic one
  18. Why it matters which you ask
  19. It is a sequence, not a transaction
  20. The order is not negotiable
  21. Never close before you open
  22. The day with nothing in it
  23. What happens in that gap
  24. And what does not come back
  25. The calendar is the whole difficulty
  26. A window, not a deadline
  27. What we put in a diary
  28. And what we never leave to chance
  29. Your earliest answer is your asset
  30. The continuity rests on it
  31. When the old and the new disagree
  32. The document nobody keeps
  33. Where it usually is
  34. What to do if it is gone
  35. Why remembering is not enough
  36. One cover, many histories
  37. What we will not fill in for you
  38. What this is not
  39. It is not a hunt for a better deal
  40. It is not a complaint
  41. It is not a renewal
  42. And the insurer is not the adviser
  43. Whose judgement this needs
  44. What we will not assess
  45. The handoff we make early
  46. How to do this properly
  47. What to do before you ask anybody
  48. What if the window has passed
  49. What not to do with the old one
  50. What this page does not decide
  51. Six quiet losses
  52. The diary entry that holds the asset
  53. Who asks us about this
  54. What we line up first
  55. The form we will not redraft
  56. Whose answer this is
  57. What we do not advise on
  58. Our fee on a portability file
  59. And what happens next year

What actually moves

Begin by correcting the description, because the standard way of describing this exercise is wrong in a way that changes how people behave.

It gets called transferring a policy, or moving a policy, as though there were an object that gets picked up from one place and set down in another.

Nothing you are holding goes anywhere.

Not the policy — the time

Because a cover of this kind is a contract for one year, and a one-year contract does not travel. It reaches its date and it finishes.

So the document in your drawer is not the thing at stake. It describes this year, it will be replaced at the end of this year in any event, and anybody can obtain an equivalent one tomorrow.

What is at stake is something the document does not contain: the credit for the years that have already run.

The asset is years

And that credit is the only reason this exercise has a name at all, which is worth sitting with for a moment.

If elapsed years counted for nothing, nobody would speak of portability. You would stop paying one company and start paying another, and it would be as unremarkable as changing a mobile provider.

The whole apparatus exists because the years are worth something. Which means the years are the asset, and everything else in the file is administration.

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Why “product” is the wrong word

The word product is what does the damage, and it does it by importing a set of assumptions from ordinary shopping.

Products are compared, chosen, bought and swapped. They exist independently of who owns them. Hand one to somebody else and it is the same object.

None of that is true of a position built out of elapsed time. It is not transferable to another person, it is not purchasable, and it does not exist apart from the particular history that produced it. Calling it a product encourages people to handle it like one, and that is where this goes wrong.

The question worth asking

So one question, put against every step in this exercise, keeps the priorities straight.

What is precious here — the paper, or the time behind it?

Almost always the answer is the time. Which immediately reorders what you protect, what you check twice, and what you are willing to risk for convenience.

What is precious here, paper or time?

Set the two beside each other, because people spend their attention on the wrong column.

 The paperThe elapsed years
ReplaceableYes, any dayNever
PurchasableYesNo, at any price
Took how long to makeAn afternoonAs long as it has been
Lost howRequest a copyOne gap, permanently
Where people’s attention goesHereNot here

If a document goes missing there is a straightforward way to get another. Nothing in the right-hand column has any such remedy, and that gap is why this guide exists.

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What the credit actually is

We should be careful here, and the care is deliberate rather than evasive.

Covers of this kind generally treat an unbroken run of years differently from a fresh start. How they treat it, over what periods, and in respect of what, we are not going to describe — it varies, it is revised, and it is not ours to state.

What is safe to say, and sufficient for everything practical on this page, is that the run has value, that the value grows with the run, and that nothing but continuing produces it. You do not need the mechanics to handle the asset correctly.

How it accumulates

And the way it builds is unusual enough to be worth naming, because it explains why people are careless with it.

You did not do anything to earn it. There was no effort, no decision, no moment of achievement. It accumulated because you did not stop — year after year, invisibly, in the background, while you were thinking about other things.

Nothing ever arrived to tell you it had grown. No statement, no certificate, no annual letter saying your position is now better than it was. An asset with no statement attached is an asset nobody thinks about.

And why it cannot be bought

Which brings us to the hardest fact in the subject, and the one that should govern how carefully you proceed.

Walk into any company tomorrow with money and you can have a cover that begins tomorrow. There is nothing you can pay to be treated as somebody who has had one for a decade.

Only time makes time. That is why an asset which cost you nothing in particular is the one to be most careful with — and exactly why people are not.

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Two questions, not one

Now the misunderstanding that sits underneath most of the trouble we see, and it is a structural one rather than a mistake anybody could be blamed for.

People approach this with a single question in mind: can we move? There is no single question. There are two, and they are answered by different considerations.

Will they take you

The first is about acceptance, and it is entirely the receiving company’s own decision.

They apply their own criteria, on their own information, in their own way, and they are not obliged to explain the reasoning or to arrive at the same answer as anybody else would. Nobody outside that company can tell you the answer in advance, and anybody who offers to is selling comfort.

Will your time come with you

The second is about continuity, and it is a different enquiry altogether.

It asks what happens to your elapsed run in the move — whether, and to what extent, the new arrangement treats your history as though it had been with them.

It turns on your record and on the terms being offered, not on the same considerations as the first question at all.

Decided separately

And the two are settled independently, which is the fact worth carrying.

 AcceptanceContinuity
Decided byThe new companyThe terms and your record
Turns onTheir own criteriaYour documented history
Can be predictedNoOnly once the record is clear
Who can advise on itA licensed adviserA licensed adviser
What we contributeNothingThe record, in order

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A yes to one is not a yes to the other

From which the operative rule follows, and we would have it written at the top of any file of this kind.

Neither answer implies the other. Get both, in writing, before anything is ended.

Not one and an assumption about the second. Not a conversation that covered both loosely. Two answers, stated, from the people entitled to give them.

Which way people get it wrong

And they get it wrong in both directions, which is worth knowing because the two errors have very different costs.

The optimistic reading

The first error: taking acceptance as confirmation of everything.

A new cover is issued. It arrives, it looks like a policy, it has the right names on it. The natural inference is that the move completed and the history came along. The document does not necessarily say so, and nobody reads it closely enough to notice that it does not.

This error is discovered late — typically at the moment somebody actually needs the position they believed they had. It is expensive, but at least nothing was destroyed in the meantime.

And the pessimistic one

The second error is the opposite inference and it is the dangerous one.

Somebody is told, correctly, that continuity exists as a mechanism and that their run would be respected. They take this as meaning the move is essentially arranged, and they act — they stop the old one, or let it run out, because it felt settled.

Acceptance had never been confirmed. And unlike the first error, this one destroys something rather than merely disappointing somebody.

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Why it matters which you ask

Which is why we are pedantic about the phrasing of the question, and we would encourage you to be too.

Not “can we port to you?”, which invites an answer about the mechanism existing. Two questions, asked separately, with the answers wanted separately: will you accept this cover, and what is the position on the years already run?

The first is a decision about you. The second is a statement about terms. A single answer that appears to cover both has almost certainly answered only one, and in our experience it is usually the easier one.

It is a sequence, not a transaction

Now the part of this subject that does real and permanent damage, and it is not about anybody’s decision. It is about order.

A transaction can be done in whatever order suits you and tidied up afterwards. A sequence has steps that depend on each other, and some sequences cannot be run backwards at all.

This is one of them.

The order is not negotiable

And the dependency runs only one way, which is what makes the order a rule rather than a preference.

The new arrangement can be put in place while the old one is still running. The old one cannot be put back once it has ended. One of the two steps is reversible and the other is not, so the irreversible one goes last.

That is the whole of the logic, and it is the same logic by which you do not hand back your house keys before the next lease is signed.

Never close before you open

We put this as a flat instruction, because it is the single line here we would defend against any objection at all.

We have seen a long run ended because a new cover was, in somebody’s entirely reasonable belief, arranged. The belief rested on a conversation. The conversation was not the arrangement.

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The day with nothing in it

Because what the rule is protecting against is not a long lapse. It is something much smaller than people imagine.

One old cover ends on a date. One new cover begins on a later date. Between them sits a period with nothing in it — possibly a week, possibly a day, possibly created by nothing more than a weekend and a processing delay.

What happens in that gap

And the significant thing about that period is not what might happen during it, which is how people assess the risk.

They think: it is only a few days, nothing is likely to happen in a few days. Which is true, and beside the point. The damage is not an event occurring in the gap. The damage is the gap itself, because what you were protecting was the property of being unbroken.

A run is not a quantity that gets slightly shorter. It is a condition, and conditions do not survive being interrupted.

And what does not come back

Which leads to the sentence we would put on the first page of every file of this kind.

The run does not resume. It restarts. And because the only thing that produces elapsed time is elapsed time, there is no step available afterwards — no payment, no explanation, no appeal, no goodwill — that puts back what the interruption removed.

Years of accumulation, ended by an administrative gap nobody intended. That asymmetry is the entire reason this exercise deserves care rather than efficiency.

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The calendar is the whole difficulty

Which makes this subject unusual among everything else we handle, and the difference is worth drawing out.

Most of what we do involves judgement somewhere — what a document should say, which obligation applies, who is responsible for what. Here almost none of the difficulty is judgement.

When one of these files fails, the cause is almost always a day on a calendar.

A window, not a deadline

And the dates are not of the familiar kind, which is part of why they catch people.

A deadline has one edge: before it you are fine, after it you are not. A window has two. You can be too late, and you can also be too early for the thing to be done properly.

We print no number of days anywhere on this page, because the period is not ours to state and because it is among the first things a licensed adviser or the company itself will tell you. What belongs here is the shape: two edges, not one, which means this has to be planned rather than reacted to.

What we put in a diary

So the practical output of this exercise is, more than anything else, a set of dated entries.

  1. The date the current cover ends — from the document, not from memory.
  2. The date by which the approach has to be made, once an adviser or the company has told you what it is.
  3. The date by which confirmation must be in hand, set well before the first date.
  4. A check date between those two, so that silence is noticed rather than waited through.
  5. The date the old cover may finally be allowed to end — which is after, never before, confirmation.

Five dates. Written down, with a named person against them. In a subject where the difficulty is almost entirely chronological, this is not administration around the edges of the work. It very nearly is the work.

And what we never leave to chance

With one entry on that list that deserves separate mention, because it is the one people omit.

The check date. Everything else on the list is an action; the check date exists to catch an absence — the case where nothing arrived, nobody said no, and the days simply passed.

In our files, the commonest cause of a gap is not a refusal. It is silence that nobody treated as information.

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Your earliest answer is your asset

Now to the documents, and to the one that matters more than every other paper in the file combined.

It is not the current year’s policy. It is the very first form you ever filled in, from the year the cover began.

The continuity rests on it

Because continuity is measured against what was stated at the beginning, not against what is stated now.

The earliest declaration is the foundation the whole run sits on. Everything built afterwards — every renewal, every year added to the count — rests on that document being the thing it is.

Which is why a file with ten years of renewals and no first-year paper is a file with an excellent record and no foundation under it.

When the old and the new disagree

And the specific risk is a disagreement between two documents written by the same person years apart.

A new form asks its questions. Somebody answers them, carefully and honestly, today. The old form asked its questions and somebody answered them, carefully and honestly, a decade ago.

If the two accounts differ, that difference is where the years are lost — and nobody involved has done anything wrong. The same facts, described twice, a decade apart, by a person doing their best.

The document nobody keeps

And now the entirely foreseeable moment in each of these files — flagged beforehand, so that when it arrives nobody treats it as something they got wrong.

You will not have it. Almost nobody does.

The current year is somewhere findable because it arrived recently. The first year was several house moves, two computers and a changed email address ago, and at the time it did not look like a document worth archiving. Nothing about it announced that it would matter most.

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Where it usually is

It is also, in most cases, recoverable — which is the useful half of this and the first thing we do.

Looking in those five places is an afternoon. Looking for it after a new form has already been submitted is not a search; it is damage assessment.

What to do if it is gone

And if it genuinely cannot be produced, that fact itself is something to carry into the conversation rather than past it.

Tell a licensed adviser that the earliest declaration is unavailable, and tell them before any new form is completed. It changes how the exercise should be approached, and it is not a question we are qualified to resolve.

Reconstructing what an old form most likely said is not something we will assist with. A plausible reconstruction of a document that cannot be produced is not a record. It is a guess wearing the clothes of one.

Why remembering is not enough

Which is the thing we would most like to talk people out of, and it is the most natural instinct in the world.

The instinct is: I know my own history, I will simply answer the new form properly. And the answers given will be honest. The risk was never dishonesty. It is drift — the same facts, in different words, with a different emphasis, a decade later.

So we lay the earlier answers beside what the new form asks, line by line. Not to coach anybody on what to write, which we will not do, but so that a difference in wording is noticed by you rather than by somebody else later.

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One cover, many histories

With one point for anybody whose cover includes more than one person, which is most households.

A family treats the cover as a single object with a single history, because that is how it is paid for and how it arrives. For this exercise it is not one history. Each person on it has their own record and their own set of earlier answers, and each has to be reconciled on its own.

That is more work rather than harder work. But it is work that cannot be done collectively, and the failure it prevents is one person’s position being handled as though it were somebody else’s.

What we will not fill in for you

And here is the right place for our own boundary on the paperwork, stated before the second half of this page rather than at the bottom of it.

We do not complete forms about people. We do not advise on what to write in them, suggest a phrasing, or offer a view on how something should be described. We assemble what the earlier record says and we put it beside the question being asked.

The answers are yours and nobody else’s, and on a form of this kind that is not a small point of procedure; it is the one condition that gives the paper any force.

What this is not

Four things this exercise gets confused with, and each confusion sends somebody down a route that does not lead anywhere useful.

Worth going through them, because people arrive at this page wanting one of the four and calling it portability.

It is not a hunt for a better deal

The first confusion. Somebody wants to pay less, or get more, and has heard that portability is how you do that.

It is not a shopping mechanism. It is the thing that stops the years being lost when a move happens for some other reason. Whether a move is worth making at all is an advisory question, it needs somebody licensed to answer it, and it is not what this exercise is for.

Which also means a move should be decided first and documented second. Deciding to move because a mechanism exists is the tail wagging the dog, and we have watched it produce moves nobody actually wanted.

It is not a complaint

The second, and the one that most often arrives mislabelled.

Something has already gone wrong — a claim refused, an amount cut, a year of poor handling — and the instinct is to leave. That instinct is understandable and the two things still have to be kept apart.

This exercise assumes everything is currently working. If something has been refused or is contested, that is a dispute and possibly an ombudsman matter, with its own route and its own timing. Running a grievance and a move at the same moment tends to damage the move.

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It is not a renewal

The third, and the one that causes the most dangerous casualness, because the two happen at the same point in the calendar.

A renewal continues an arrangement with the same company. It takes ten minutes, it rarely goes wrong, and most people have done it so many times that it has stopped being an event.

This ends one arrangement and begins another while asking that a decade be respected. It arrives in the diary wearing a renewal’s clothes and it is a far more consequential act, which is why it gets ten minutes of attention and needs considerably more.

And the insurer is not the adviser

The fourth, and the most consequential of the four.

The company you are approaching is a party to the arrangement, not a neutral guide to it. Their staff may be helpful, well informed and entirely honest, and they are still answering from inside one of the two sides.

Ask them what they will do. Do not ask them whether you should.

Whose judgement this needs

Which sets out who the three parties actually are, because conflating them is how people end up with no independent view at all.

QuestionWhose
Should you move at all?A licensed adviser or broker
Which company, and on what terms?The same
Will you be accepted?The company itself, and nobody else
What is the position on the years?The company, in writing
Is the record complete and unbroken?Ours
What are the dates, and in what order?Ours
Something has already been refusedAn advocate, or the ombudsman route

Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.

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What we will not assess

And our own limits on this subject are tighter than on anything else in this series, which is intentional.

We will not say whether to move, which company to approach, whether you will be accepted, what will be treated as continuous, how long any period runs, or what any of it costs. We publish no comparison, no company name, no premium and no period.

We also do not ask about, record or discuss anybody’s circumstances or history beyond the dates on the documents. That is not a limitation we are apologising for. It is the correct shape for a service that handles the file and not the person.

The handoff we make early

So on this subject, unusually for us, the handing-over happens up front instead of once we have finished.

On most files we assemble first and hand over at the point a judgement is needed. Here the advisory question — should this happen, and with whom — comes before the documentation is worth doing at all.

So the sensible order is: a licensed adviser decides whether and where, the company answers acceptance and continuity, and we make the record able to support whatever they decide. Three parties, in that order, and we are the third.

How to do this properly

The working half, in the order that keeps the asset safe.

  1. Find the first-year pack and the original form before anything else happens.
  2. Build the year list with dates and the company name against each year.
  3. Check every premium against the account it was paid from, and note any account change.
  4. List each person on the cover separately, with their own earlier answers.
  5. Take the whole record to a licensed adviser, who decides whether and where.
  6. Ask the receiving company two separate questions, and get both answers in writing.
  7. Only then let the old cover end — and keep every document from it afterwards.

One through four belong to us and consume most of the hours. Steps five and six are not ours at all. Step seven is one line and it is the one that protects everything above it.

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What to do before you ask anybody

And there is real value in doing the first four steps before approaching anybody, which is not the order most people use.

People approach a company first and go looking for documents afterwards, when something is asked for. The trouble is that you then discover the break in your own run at the moment it is least convenient to discover it.

Find out what your record actually says while nothing is pending. If there is a gap in it, you want to know that privately, with time, and before anybody has been told anything.

What if the window has passed

And if you are reading this too late in the cycle, the honest advice is short.

Do not force it. Let the current cover renew as it is, and plan the move for the next cycle properly. A rushed move at the edge of a window is how gaps get created, and a year of staying put costs you nothing except a year of a company you have decided to leave.

Waiting one cycle is an inconvenience. A gap is not an inconvenience, and it is not reversible.

What not to do with the old one

Four things to avoid once the move has happened, each of which we have seen cause trouble later.

And keep the whole set somewhere retrievable, because next time — and there is usually a next time — the first-year problem will repeat with a different first year.

What this page does not decide

Seeing how a thing is built leaves you no closer to a decision about it. Nothing below has been settled here.

Everything we do sits before and beside that list, and stays narrow on purpose.

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Six quiet losses

Six shapes, taken from the files we have handled. Five of them involved no decision by anybody.

The patternHow it happened
A long run ended by a four-day gapNew cover started late; dates were never aligned
Years lost on a wording differenceNew form completed from memory, old form never found
Run broken years earlier, discovered nowAutomatic debit failed when a bank account closed
Old cover ended on a phone callEncouraging conversation taken as confirmation
One person’s position handled as the family’sCover treated as one history instead of several
Nothing arrived and nobody chased itSilence was waited through rather than noticed

Run your eye down the second column. Only the fourth was a choice, and even that one was made in good faith on information that sounded firm. The rest are administration, and administration is exactly what this exercise is.

The diary entry that holds the asset

Which is this whole page reduced to the smallest thing that would have prevented most of it.

A dated line, with a name against it, saying: the old one does not end until the new one is confirmed in writing. Plus one check date, so that silence gets noticed.

Two entries in a diary, protecting something that cannot be rebuilt at any price. That is the entire ratio of effort to value in this subject.

Who asks us about this

The requests that reach us fall into a handful of shapes, and the shape is usually a good indicator of how much can still be saved.

The first two are the files where everything is still intact. The fourth is the one where we can establish what happened and very little else.

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What we line up first

Our own part is tracing, listing and dating, and it stops before anybody’s judgement is required.

  1. Trace the original form and the first-year pack through every route they might survive on, and get copies into your hands.
  2. Build the year-by-year history with dates, and the company name against each year, because mergers and renames make one run look like two.
  3. Reconcile every premium against the account it left from, and flag every account change as a point to verify.
  4. Say plainly whether the run is unbroken, including anything in it you did not know was there.
  5. List every person on the cover separately, each with their own earlier answers attached.
  6. Lay those earlier answers beside the questions a new form asks, so that any drift in wording is yours to notice.
  7. Write the five dates into a diary with a named owner, and leave a one-page note of the sequence for whoever handles this next time.

Not one step in that list is a judgement, an opinion or a recommendation. All of it is why the people who do decide can decide on a complete record.

The form we will not redraft

One thing we decline, and on this subject the request is made gently and often.

We will not phrase, suggest, improve or complete an answer about a person, and we will not help anybody reconstruct what an old form probably said. Nor will any paper we prepare carry a date other than the day it was made.

Nobody who asks this means any harm — the wish is simply for the two papers to sound like each other. But a form about a person, drafted by somebody other than that person, is a document whose value depends entirely on who stands behind it — and the whole point of the exercise is that the person does.

Whose answer this is

Which is worth stating positively rather than only as a refusal, because it is the heart of how this works.

Everything that eventually protects your run is something you said, in your own words, at a time when nobody was coaching you — and something you say now, in your own words, matching it.

Our contribution is to make sure you can see what you said the first time. That is a surprisingly large contribution and it is not an advisory one.

What we do not advise on

Said once more at the point people most often try again, and the answer is the same as it was higher up.

Not suitability, not choice of company, not acceptance, not continuity terms, not periods, not cost, not anything about anybody. Those sit with a licensed adviser and with the company, and the licence is not a formality — it is what makes the advice worth acting on.

What we will tell you is whether your record holds together, and exactly where it does not.

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Our fee on a portability file

For getting the record and the calendar into a state that protects the run — tracing the original form and the first-year pack through the company, the agent who sold it, the old welcome email and the first-year envelope, and putting copies in your hands; building the year-by-year history with dates and the company name against every year, because a merger or a rename makes one unbroken run look like two separate ones; reconciling every premium against the account it actually left from and flagging each account change as a point that has to be verified; telling you plainly whether the run is unbroken, including anything in it you did not know was there; listing every person on the cover separately with their own earlier answers attached, because a cover is one object and several histories; laying those earlier answers beside the questions a new form asks so that any drift in wording is yours to catch rather than somebody else’s to find later; and writing the five dates into a diary with a named owner and a one-page note of the sequence — the fee is ₹1,499. Of the 7 – 20 days quoted, our reading and tracing is days; the rest is waiting on a company and on a document somebody has to dig out.

Each of these is charged apart, for the reason given:

Said without decoration: the fee buys a record you can rely on and a calendar that cannot be forgotten. Nobody needs help filling in a form. What breaks these files is a first-year document that cannot be found and a date that nobody wrote down — and both of those are solved before anybody is approached.

And what happens next year

A last word, because the move is not the end of this and the asset does not become safe once it has been carried.

From the day the new arrangement begins, the run starts accumulating again, in the same silent way, with the same absence of any statement telling you it is growing. The same risks apply: a renewal date, a bank account that changes, a first-year document that is being created right now and will be impossible to find in a decade.

You did not finish protecting the asset. You moved it, and started building the next one — so the paper you file today is the paper somebody will be hunting for next time.

Protect the years before anything is ended

We trace the original form and the first-year pack, build the year-by-year history with dates and company names, reconcile every premium against the account it left from, tell you plainly whether the run is unbroken, list each person on the cover with their own earlier answers, lay those answers beside what a new form asks, and write the five dates into a diary with a named owner. We do not advise whether or where to move, predict acceptance, state any period or premium, or assess anything about anybody.

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How this page was built, and the things it deliberately leaves out

Nowhere on this page: any period or waiting time, any premium or cost figure, any company or product name, any comparison, any statement about who is likely to be accepted, any regulation or provision, any portal or form step, and anything at all about any person’s circumstances or history. On a page about moving a cover between companies, that is very nearly everything a reader arrives expecting to find, and the omissions are not all of the same kind.

Three reasons, and they get progressively more important. The periods, figures and mechanics are absent for the ordinary reason: they get amended, they differ from one place to the next, and a confident statement of them outlives its own accuracy by years. Suitability and company choice are absent for a regulatory reason that we think is a good one rather than an inconvenience — comparing covers and recommending one is advisory work that requires a licence, we do not hold one, and a page that drifted into looking like advice would be doing something it is not answerable for. The third reason is the one that shaped the page most. This subject sits next to information about people that is nobody’s business but theirs. So we built the entire guide out of documents, dates and sequence, and left every question about any person’s circumstances entirely alone — not hedged, not generalised, not touched. That is why there is no section here on who gets accepted and no description of what is treated how. It is a deliberate shape, not a gap.

Strip every one of those away and the skeleton remains, untouched by any revision. That the policy is a one-year contract and is not what moves — the credit for elapsed years is, and the years are the asset while the paper is administration. That no amount of money produces elapsed time, which makes the thing that cost you nothing in particular the thing to guard most carefully. That this is two questions people merge into one, decided independently, so that a yes to acceptance is not a yes to continuity and the reverse error is worse. That it is a sequence rather than a transaction, with one reversible step and one irreversible one, which is why the irreversible one goes last and the old cover never ends before the new one is confirmed in writing. That the harm in a gap is not an event occurring during it but the interruption itself, because a run is a condition and not a quantity. That the whole difficulty is chronological — a window with two edges rather than a deadline with one. That continuity is measured against the earliest declaration, which makes the first form you ever filled in the most valuable paper in the file and also the one nobody kept. And that most broken runs were nobody’s decision, but a premium debit that stopped working when a bank account changed. Change every figure in the industry tomorrow and all of that still holds.

Why the sequence rule is the line we would keep. Never close before you open. Of everything here, it is the sentence that has prevented the most damage, and it costs nothing to follow — a short overlap is cheap, and a gap is not priced at all because it cannot be bought back. It is also the only part of this exercise entirely within your control: you cannot decide whether a company accepts you, what the terms say or how long anything takes, but you can decide not to let go of the old thing until the new thing is in your hand. On a subject where almost everything is somebody else’s decision, that is worth knowing.

Where to go rather than here. A licensed insurance adviser or broker, first and not last, for whether this move is sensible and with whom — that conversation belongs before the documentation, which is unusual for us and correct here. The receiving company itself, in writing, for acceptance and for the position on the years; ask the two as separate questions and keep both answers. Your own first-year envelope, which is the one source that settles what was declared at the beginning and which somebody should be looking for today. Your bank statements, which are the only honest record of whether the premium actually went out every year it was supposed to. And whoever in the household handled this when it began, who may not be the person handling it now and who may remember where the first pack went.

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Questions people actually ask

We want to move our cover to a different company. What is actually being moved?
Not the thing you are probably picturing. The policy itself is not portable — a policy is a one-year contract and it simply ends. What moves is the credit for the years you have already run. That credit is the asset here, and it is the only reason this exercise exists. Without it you would simply buy a new cover from whoever you liked and nobody would call it anything.
So we are not transferring a product?
No, and the word product is what misleads people into treating this as a purchase. You are asking a new company to issue you something fresh and to treat your elapsed years as though they had been run with them. Two different things, and only the second one is difficult. Thinking of it as moving an account from one bank to another is the wrong picture entirely.
Why does the time matter so much?
Because of how covers of this kind are built: an unbroken run of years is treated differently from a fresh start. We are deliberately not going to describe how, or over what periods, because that varies and it is not ours to state. What we will say is that the years are the part with value, they took years to make, and nothing except time can produce them.
Can we not just buy the years, or pay extra for them?
That is the question almost everybody asks and the answer is the hardest fact in this subject. No amount of money produces elapsed time. A premium can buy you a cover today. It cannot buy you a position that only exists because somebody kept something running for a long time. Which is why an asset that cost you nothing in particular is the one worth protecting most carefully.
What is the single biggest misunderstanding you see?
People treat this as one question when it is two, and the two are decided separately and by different considerations. First: will the new company take you at all? Second: if they take you, will your elapsed years come with you? Those are not the same decision, they are not made for the same reasons, and a yes to one is not a yes to the other.
How does getting that wrong actually hurt somebody?
In both directions, and we see both. Some people assume that being accepted means everything carried over, discover later that it did not, and find out at the worst possible moment. Others assume that because their years would carry, acceptance was a formality, and act on that before anybody confirmed it. The second is the more dangerous of the two, and the next answer says why.
What is the actual danger here?
The sequence. This is a sequence, not a transaction, and it cannot be run backwards. If the old cover ends before the new one is in place, there is a period with nothing in it — and what you were protecting was never the paper, it was the unbroken run. A single day of nothing can end something that took years to build.
So the old one must stay in force until the new one is confirmed?
If you act on one line from this page, make it that one; nothing else here comes close in value. Never close before you open. Not after you have applied. Not after somebody on a phone sounded encouraging. Not after a payment has been made. Confirmed, in writing, with the continuity position stated — and only then is the old one allowed to end.
What if we have already let the old one lapse?
Then this stops being a portability question and becomes a different one, and it should go to a licensed adviser today rather than next week. What the position now is, we will not state, since it hangs on how long the gap has run and on terms we have not read. What we will say is that very little in our work shifts with the calendar the way this does, day by day.
Is there a time window for doing this?
There is, and this is the unusual feature of the whole subject. Almost everything difficult here is a date rather than a judgement. You cannot start too late and you also cannot sensibly start too early. We print no number of days on this page because it is not ours to state and it is the first thing a licensed adviser or the insurer will tell you — but the existence of the window is the reason this is a diary exercise above all.
What is the most valuable document in a file like this?
The first form you ever filled in — the original proposal, from the year you first took the cover. Your continuity rests on what you declared at the beginning, and if a new form says something different from the old one, that is exactly where years get lost. It is also, almost without exception, the one document nobody has kept.
We definitely do not have that. What now?
You probably have it and do not know where, which is the first thing we check. It is usually with the insurer, with the agent who sold it, in an old email, or in the policy pack from the first year rather than the current one. If it genuinely cannot be found, that is something to tell a licensed adviser before any new form is filled in, not afterwards.
Can we not just fill the new form from memory?
This is the thing we would most like to talk people out of. Remembering is not the same as matching, and the risk is not that you lie — it is that you describe the same facts in different words ten years apart, in good faith. A new form completed from memory and an old form completed at the time are two documents that may not agree, and the disagreement is what costs the years.
Our cover includes the whole family. Does that complicate it?
It adds work rather than difficulty, and it is work that has to be done per person. Each person on a cover has their own history and their own set of earlier answers, and each has to be reconciled separately. Families routinely treat the cover as one object with one history, which is how one person’s position quietly gets handled as though it were somebody else’s.
Will you tell us whether the new company will accept us?
No, and nobody should offer to. Acceptance is the insurer’s own decision, made on their own criteria, and a prediction from us would be worth nothing except false comfort. Suitability — whether this move is a good idea at all — belongs with a licensed insurance adviser or broker, who is regulated for exactly that and whom we are not substituting for.
Will you advise us which company to move to?
We will not, and this is a firm line rather than modesty. Comparing covers and recommending one is advisory work that requires a licence, and we do not hold it and do not want to appear to. We also print no comparison, no product name and no premium figure anywhere on this page. Our part is the file and the sequence.
Then what exactly do you do here?
The unglamorous half, and on this subject it is most of the work. We trace the original proposal form and the first-year policy pack and get copies into your hands. We build the year-by-year history with dates and reconstruct whether the run is genuinely unbroken. We list every person on the cover separately with their own history. We lay the earlier answers beside what the new form asks, so that nothing drifts in wording. We put the dates in a diary with the sequence written out. And we do not advise, compare, predict or fill in anything about anybody.
Why does the old history need reconstructing? Surely it is just a list of years.
It usually is not, and this is where most files turn out to be interesting. A run people describe as unbroken often has something in it — a renewal paid a few days late, a year taken with a different company, a policy that changed name when the insurer merged, a premium that silently failed on a closed bank account. Any of those changes the picture, and all of them are invisible until somebody lines the dates up.
What is the commonest thing you find?
A payment that stopped working. A premium is usually on an automatic debit, and the account it was set up on gets closed or changed — and nothing announces that a debit has started failing. Most of the broken runs we see were nobody’s decision at all. They were a bank account change nobody connected to an insurance policy.
Is this the same as a complaint, or a dispute?
No, and keeping them separate matters because they go to different places. This is a move while everything is working. If something has already been refused or a claim has gone wrong, that is a dispute or an ombudsman matter, which is a different exercise with a different route. Trying to do both at once generally damages the move.
Is it the same as a renewal?
It is not, although it happens at renewal time, which is why they get conflated. A renewal continues an arrangement with the same company. This ends one and begins another while asking that the years be respected. The second is a far more consequential act than the first, and it deserves more than the ten minutes a renewal usually gets.
Realistically, how long does this take?
Allow 7 – 20 days for the whole exercise, and understand where that time actually goes. Our own work is reading and tracing, which is days. The rest is waiting on an insurer and on documents that have to be dug out of somewhere. The thing that genuinely delays these files is a first-year document nobody can find, so the sooner somebody starts looking, the shorter this gets.
What is the one habit that would prevent most of this?
Checking the payment after any change to a bank account. That one check prevents the commonest way this asset gets destroyed, and it takes a minute. Second to it: keeping the first year’s papers somewhere separate from the current year’s, because the opening year carries the weight and is precisely the one that gets binned.
List the things you flatly will not answer.
Whether the move is a good idea; which company to choose; whether you will be accepted; what will and will not be treated as continuous; how long any period is; what anything costs; and anything whatsoever about anybody’s circumstances or history beyond the dates on the documents. The first six belong to a licensed adviser and to the insurer. The last is not something we record or discuss at all.
What should we have found before we talk to you?
Three items, and item one carries nearly all the weight. The policy pack from the very first year, not the current one. The list of years with the company name against each, because companies merge and rename. And the bank account each premium has been paid from, with a note of any time that account changed. With those three this is quick; without the first one it is most of the 7 – 20 days.
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