I love how they keep inching up the rates, often just .5% each time but always up. I know they have the house over valued for today's market by probably 30% but they claim it's formula set. I've had Auto-Owners for the house and five vehicles for a number of years and really like my agent but I think it's time to do another "baseline" test of rates. Any recommendations?

 

Yeah, on the Gulf Coast all of us home owners are now paying for the massive hurricane damage of the past few years. We have everything insured in a package from State Farm for so many years I don't want to change. I even got a letter from them saying that I had been with them for so long my auto insurance could never be cancelled for any reason. That's reassuring, since I have two teen age drivers on the list.

 

I have New Jersey Skylands, which is part of an umbrella group called Tower Group Companies, out of NYC. My auto and homeowners is with them. I found them to be very competitive and generally very good as far as customer service. When they bundled the coverages my bill went down by 20%, but it seems you have done that already. (We also went through an ins. reform a few years ago, that lowered auto considerably, but that's a different story).

I would try to keep the insurance value of your home up, because replacement costs of construction the exact house that you have will most likely be significantly higher than the market value of you house.

You can get bids on-line these days, but I would do a sanity check.

An aside, I once had an Ins. co. "meet" the price of a competitor to keep me, but that's a job for your agent.

 

I have been with State Farm for over 40 years and have been very happy with them. We recently reviewed all of our auto and HO insurance with our agent and even though home prices have fallen here we did not reduce our coverage. We made some adjustments to deductibles and found a monthly auto insurance charge which was unwarranted. It was removed and we received a refund check for the money they charged us. It was a worth while meeting and I would suggest doing this rather than reducing your coverage.

 

I have Allstate for my home and cars. I only had one claim and that was last year for a roof replacement. We had a major wind/hail storm come through and just about everyone had a roof damage. From the ground mine looked fine, but I had a contractor look at mine and he found several shingles loose. He provided me with an estimate and Allstate sent one of their inspectors over. The Allstate person wasn't on the roof 10 minutes and accepted my claim. A $10K replacement, no questions asked. Several other neighbor's who had other agency's were given partial replacements. One of my neighbor's actually had a hole in his roof and his insurance company only wanted to repair the hole. The roofing contractor said that Allstate was the easiest insurance company he has ever worked with. One other note, the contractor didn't measure the roof correctly and found that he was 5 square off, but it was his mistake, so he didn't charge anything additional.

 

Aint this recession great? I just got our tax bill - $371. They say the fair market value of our house is now $82,000. To build this house on a clean lot would be $160k - $200k today. Cleaning up storm or fire damage and rebuilding would probably be more than a quarter million.

Are you all insured for replacement value?

 

funny note on insurance.
my wife was "sure" we were paying too much for our insurance.
so she told our independent agent to shop it.
to do so we had to fill out reams of paperwork on house and contents.
we came in substantially under-insured for replacement value and wound up with a 15% bump on our bill.

 

I have had great luck with Amica. My family has been using them for years, and they rank high on satisfaction lists. We've had to make a couple auto claims with them, and they were very friendly - cleared things no questions asked. I just got my own house and am using them for homeowner's. I can just shoot an email to my agent about any improvements I'm planning on making, and she gets back to me very quickly with her answer.

I'd suggest getting in touch with them, like someone else said, for a reality check to see if you're paying too much. I think a lot of the insurance companies are trying to recoup their losses in recent years with all the disasters that have drained their pocketbooks.

 

I got this email from a friend.....here in MI.

Be careful when switching homeowners. Due to legislation that was passed this year, they no longer offer “replacement” value for your home. If you have an existing replacement value policy, they must continue to honor it but can raise the rates accordingly. The new policies are set for “market” value which apparently is what they feel your home is worth in the open market. Of course in many cases, the money provided would never be enough to replace the home and you would then be force to move. It was Michigan Legislation; another fine example of folks who have way too much time to make more laws. Of course the most financially successful states have part time legislators…go figure?

 

That really sucks. I could never replace my house for market value, especially in this down market. We are insured at about 160-170% of market.