Why Insurance

Insurance exists because risk exists. There is a possibility that anyone could become a victim of fire, theft, auto accidents, other injury accidents, illness, severe weather, lawsuits and more. We are subject to risk at home, at work, in our cars, traveling, in the hospital or anywhere at any time.

Insurance cannot remove the risk or the likelihood that one might become a victim of any of these events, but what it does is transfer all or some of the financial impact of any of these events. Insurance exists to help individuals recover from the financial consequences of these events by pooling the resources of a large group to pay for the losses of a small group.

Insurance has been around in some form since traders first began to travel over water to trade their goods. There is documented evidence that Chinese and Babylonian traders began to protect themselves against risk as far back as the 3rd century BC. Traders realized that if they spread their goods among multiple vessels, rather than putting all of their cargo on one vessel, they had a better chance of avoiding complete loss.

In later years, shippers in Great Britain reasoned that if 100 ship owners each chipped in money, if some of those ships were damaged or lost, the money collected from all 100 ships could be used to repair or replace the few. Extreme losses following the Great Fire of London in 1666 led to the creation of the world's first actual insurance company, The Insurance Office, or The Fire Office. And in the United States, the first insurance company was started in Charleston, South Carolina in 1732. Benjamin Franklin is recognized as helping to make insurance popular and to standardize the practice of insurance.