Tuesday, June 05, 2012

The Scam that is Homeowner's Insurance

This is a boring post about homeowner's insurance. I just googled "the truth about homeowner's insurance" and other such phrases, looking for some online wisdom, but I couldn't find what I was looking for.

Here's what I was looking for: confirmation of what Mark was told recently by several people, including a representative from an insurance company and an independent insurance broker. Here's what happened: our insurance policy was cancelled by the company we've used for probably the last 17 years (since we first owned a house). The reason was that we made too many claims. "Too many claims" = two in the the last three years. Not only, apparently, is two claims in three years (or three in five years) too many, but the advice these insurance experts gave Mark was crazy.

They said that nowadays, with home ownership in the state it is (uh, high rate of foreclosures? Dangerous mortgages? I'm not sure exactly what that means), a home owner should never file a claim. Never. Well, unless it's catastrophic, i.e. your house burns to the ground. We are supposed to consider our homeowner's insurance to be like catastrophic medical insurance, and not use it. If a tree falls on your roof and causes $900 in damage, pay it.

Because, apparently, they can and will cancel your policy outright, and that makes it really hard to get another insurance company to cover you.

And that is my public service announcement for the year.

4 comments:

Danni said...

Insurance companies. :/ <--- annoyed face

Melissa Crowe said...

Ridiculous, ridiculous bullshit that only confirms that all insurance, if it's going to exist, should be tightly regulated or actually run by the government. (And then we need a better government, but that's an argument for another day...) I'm sorry, friend.

mama d said...

OMG! This is just terrible! I've heard about this with car insurance, but I didn't know it was also true with homeowners! We have an insurance company that I like a lot if you ever want to talk about it....I guess one of you should just have gone out and caught that tree and deflected it from the house!

Adam said...

Insurance is about pooling risks among as many people as possible. It shouldn't be a business.

So sorry, Lizzie!