Administrative Charge

  

Insurance companies often foresee the need to collect revenue from administrative fees in addition to insurance premiums. Administrative charges are usually incurred when a client needs to cancel or make a change in his policy “mid-term,” or after the beginning of a new policy year.

For example, he or she might be getting married, moving to a new house, buying a new car or having a baby. Unfortunately, these situations will most likely incur an administrative charge that they probably did not expect.

Sometimes you can reduce or avoid these charges by making the change yourself online, but many companies charge a fee no matter how the change is made. There is always the hope that the changes you make to your policy will result in a lower insurance premium to help make up for the administrative charge.

Related or Semi-related Video

Finance: What is a 12b1 fee?91 Views

00:00

Finance a la shmoop.. what is a 12b1 fee what a clever name like why don't they give

00:09

normal names to these things like fund admin expense fee or just name it Bob [Document with Bob written at the top]

00:15

but they don't so you just have to memorize what they mean anyway

00:18

mutual funds had to bear enormous communications related expenses in the

00:23

pre computer-internet everyone has an email address era delivering gobs of [Mail man arrives at house]

00:29

paperwork snail mail to its customers it was enough expense to them that well

00:34

they frankly just hated doing it and did more or less anything they could to [Man licking envelopes]

00:38

avoid having to deliver you know dead trees so along came the investment

00:43

advisors act of 1940 which basically recognized that mutual funds did in fact

00:48

have expenses that were more than bonuses to the senior partners the 12b1

00:53

fee system allowed a fairly set and standard amount of fees to be charged to

00:58

customers so that a given mutual fund could recoup the money it had to spend [Fund statement document appears]

01:03

mailing annual reports and performance data and tax information and all kinds

01:07

of other things to its customers the 12b1 system was basically a

01:11

pass through set of charges such that the customer paid for her own paperwork

01:17

incentivizing mutual funds to actually do a good job communicating with their [Woman receiving a trophy on stage]

01:21

constituency and it let the little guy mutual funds compete against the big guy

01:26

mutual funds who already had all that infrastructure of course the biggest

01:29

winner out of this entire deal yeah it was the trees especially the ones who [Tree given a first prize award]

01:33

got in early on Google

Up Next

Finance: What is commission?
112 Views

What is commission? Commission is incentive based compensation earned by facilitators based on a percentage of the dollar value of the transaction(...

Finance: What is overhead?
14187 Views

What is overhead? Overhead refers to a business’s operating expenses. These can include, rent, supplies, insurance, utilities, payroll, etc. Over...

Find other enlightening terms in Shmoop Finance Genius Bar(f)