ARAG Group be carefull when dealing with construction package with ARAG Des Moines Iowa

I have been subscribing to ARAG benefits through my employer since 2008 and have probably used the service once before (telephone advise from an attorney) until now. Here is the situation.

I am buying a lot and then getting a builder to build my house. I was unclear on the benefits and what all is covered and hence called ARAG customer care (though I doubt why they bother calling it a "Care" where they in reality don't care. more on that later). I did try to use their web site to understand my options but couldn't get a real answer among the maze of legal jargons and fine prints forever sentence.

My call was answered by a guy and i told him - "I am buying a land and would build a new home later this year. What are my options?"

The rep asked me 4 or 5 questions like if this would be a rental property or not etc and then said all attorney fees is covered under my plan. He send me a CaseAssist package with few attorney's names and another PDF that documents my benefits. It documents the title as "Construction Package".

I take that happily to an attorney's office and they look at it and say oh! ARAG has excellent coverage and starts working on my case.

After one week I wanted to get in touch with the attorney and start preparing something for the contract with the builder and asked him to check on my benefits if that would be covered. I heard back from his office saying ARAG has told them Construction is covered, land purchase is not! (guess it's only covered when you build a house in thin air!)

I called ARAG back and my call was handled by a nice lady who clarified that since the land purchase and the construction are two separate transactions, land purchase is not covered. Fair enough. But why the hell no one told me that before?? How on earth will a normal person with common sense know that "Construction Package" doesn’t cover buying a land which may or may not be in the same transaction? She said she will escalate this to her supervisor.

I got a call from her supervisor the next Monday who asked me what happened. Looks like they either don't read the notes, or no one cares to write them down in the first place. anyway, I explained everything to him and he began to state that the construction package doesn't say buying a land is covered (it doesn't say that it's not covered too, so room for them to decide what they will cover and what they want as they like. Nowhere on their website i could find anything remotely related to buying a land).

Anyway, at the end I asked him "... so what you are saying is now i have to fork the cost of all the time the attorney has spent on this". He replied: "We will cover the time already spent, but anything moving forward will not be covered". As a happy customer, I thanked him.

After 30 mins or so, i get an email saying that "as discussed we will cover the initial one (1) hour" of service and rest will be billed to you at a 25% discounted rate. Surprised, I emailed him back saying that there was no discussion around "Initial one hour in our call".

Since then, we have been going back and forth and the supervisor kept insisting that he said one hour will be covered, which is a blatant lie. He kept on saying over email that I misunderstood him. What is there to misunderstand?

My guess is, he over committed and now is backing out. i have no problem if he was upfront and said we can only cover 1 hour. But this twisting of words and no regard for their customers pushed me to the limit. I asked repeatedly over email (no point calling unless I am recording the calls) to get me in touch with his manager or an escalation point - he didn't even bother to do it. Instead, he kept sending me fine prints from everywhere that says something to the effect of : "if during the engagement your requirement changes we will not cover it bla bla bla" I am guessing he just trying to suppress this incident at his level. But what he doesn't know is that I am not a person who will let this go so easily. I am a very honest person and one thing I never let go is screwing around with me.

Here is my next steps:

1. Get a ripOff report filed - Done

2. Reach out to HR and file a complaint with the person handling ARAG relationship - In Progress

3. File a complaint with Fair Trade Commission - next on my list

4. Any other suggestions? Please      feel free to comment.

I am not paying for this dumb service anymore. I have paid over $1000 all these years and now I have to pay another $500-$600 when I actually need them. What's the point?