PerfectWhelm with Eric Slivoskey: The Podcast That Helps Enhance Your Life · Eric Slivoskey, life coach

44. Insure & Explore; Mixing Travel Fun With Smart Protection: Part 6 of My Let’s Go Around The Globe Travel Series

·47 min·3 clips

Eric says a Brussels rental car was smashed open and all his clothes, computer, and teaching materials were stolen.

He starts with the mess of getting an episode recorded. He says this one took several tries, and that he is doing it on a Sunday morning after just getting back from Idaho, where he had been coaching football. The schedule has been tight. Because of that, he explains, the show is temporarily at one episode a week, even though he hopes to get back to two episodes soon, maybe within the next two or three weeks. Then he shifts to travel. That brings the travel series back around and leads into a question he says people ask him sometimes: how scripted the episodes are, or how much of the conversation is planned in advance. The answer comes through the story itself. He recounts a trip where he took a chance and did not buy travel insurance, and he calls that choice a poor move in hindsight. It cost him plenty of time. He ended up in a hospital for probably seven or eight hours, arriving in the evening and not getting out until around three or four in the morning. When the tests were done, he was released and told he did not have a blood clot in his leg, though his blood tests suggested something with clotting still needed follow-up in the United States. The billing part felt surreal. He says he asked the charge nurse what to do about the bill, only to be told he was free to go, and he kept waiting for someone to correct the misunderstanding. No one ever did. He never received a bill or notice from the hospital, which made the whole ordeal feel almost impossible to believe, especially given how much testing it would likely have cost in America. He then broadens the lesson. The story becomes a reminder that travel insurance can feel like a nuisance before departure and a huge relief when a trip takes a hard turn. He also starts to bring up another time in Chennai, India, when he got violently sick, but the source cuts off before that thought finishes.

As heard by us

A loose, lived-in warning about how costly it can be to skip travel insurance.

Eric Slavosky turns travel insurance into a plain warning about how fast a trip can get expensive once a hospital visit enters the picture. He starts with the odd, offhand feel of recording on a Sunday morning, then moves into the hospital stay, the long wait, the advice…

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Why you'd press play

A missed insurance decision turns into a hospital-bill scare abroad.

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