The fleecing of the American Homeowner.

Aeroknow

Aeroknow

Well-Known Member
Phytoplankton said:
I have a couple properties, one is in the mountains by Mt. Lassen (a volcano), and insurance is horribly expensive because of the fire danger. Kinda weird, because in the last 15 years we've had three fires and most everything is burned around the property (but not on it), in reality there's not much left to burn. What's funny is I also have volcano insurance, and it's cheap. I started shopping around and was told by several agents to keep my current insurance, becaue no one will pick up insurance in a fire zone, they don't care about the volcano! The house I live in is insured, BUT, it's in a flood zone (10), so I do not have flood insurance, it would be almost 10K a year, so for floods I'm self insured.

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I lost everything in The Camp fire. I rebuilt in the same county but lower and relatively safe from fires. There’s hardly any trees out here.
While i was building, i had a builders policy. Kept upping the policy limits until I got a little too done and they gave me the boot. So I went shopping for a HO policy and son of a bitch if the only thing I could get was the Ca Fair plan. $3500/yr for very shitty policy limits and they didn’t offer liability so had to buy that from a different company.
Then I got a call from State Farm. The gal I spoke with took my info and ran it through the system to see if i could get a policy. I thought this was a waste of time. Then she said yes, they write a policy. Holy shit! It is a pretty good policy for like $1800/year. I was only paying $1200/year in Paradise.
That was like 4 months before State Farm announced they will not be writing anymore HO policies in Ca. I thought for sure i’m gonna get the boot. So far so good, but they did raise it to around $2200/year recently.
 
P

Phytoplankton

Well-Known Member
Aeroknow said:
I lost everything in The Camp fire. I rebuilt in the same county but lower and relatively safe from fires. There’s hardly any trees out here.
While i was building, i had a builders policy. Kept upping the policy limits until I got a little too done and they gave me the boot. So I went shopping for a HO policy and son of a bitch if the only thing I could get was the Ca Fair plan. $3500/yr for very shitty policy limits and they didn’t offer liability so had to buy that from a different company.
Then I got a call from State Farm. The gal I spoke with took my info and ran it through the system to see if i could get a policy. I thought this was a waste of time. Then she said yes, they write a policy. Holy shit! It is a pretty good policy for like $1800/year. I was only paying $1200/year in Paradise.
That was like 4 months before State Farm announced they will not be writing anymore HO policies in Ca. I thought for sure i’m gonna get the boot. So far so good, but they did raise it to around $2200/year recently.
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My sympathies! The Dixie fire was stopped about 400 yards from my place, had they not spent a week putting a borate line around the area we would have burned. We were evacuated for two weeks. I have State Fatm, have for years, I’m paying about 5k, up from 3.5k, but it’s 12 acres with three houses.
 
DoubleAtotheRON

DoubleAtotheRON

Well-Known Member
Phytoplankton said:
My sympathies! The Dixie fire was stopped about 400 yards from my place, had they not spent a week putting a borate line around the area we would have burned. We were evacuated for two weeks. I have State Fatm, have for years, I’m paying about 5k, up from 3.5k, but it’s 12 acres with three houses.
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Sounds like we have about the same amount of spread. Not as bad as I thought it would be for your area, but still. Here in OK, 2022 was $2,025.00, and 2023 was $3,654.00
 
injinji

injinji

Well-Known Member
I think climate change and where people are allowed to build make up the bulk of the problem. If there is not a big shooting, the weather leads the news every day. It is flooding somewhere, or a town got hit with twisters, or freak snow and ice storms disrupts life every single day. Every one of those will include huge payouts for the people involved.

Here in Florida we are having serious problems with insurance companies leaving the state. Too many folks, too many hurricanes. Little Ronnie and his Large Government has set up a state system of last resort, but there is not enough money to cover the next big one. The Feds will be ask to bail us out.

Michael hit the Sandhill pretty hard. The eye was a couple three miles to the west of us. All the woods were wrecked, and all my land is woods. The payout for damage to the house was fine. It almost covered what had to be done. But the payout for "other structures" (decks, pumphouse, sheds, barns, fences, etc, etc) was capped at $25K while we had over $125K in assessed damage.

In the five years since, our rates gone up from around $1K per year to about 1.5K.

We bought the riverhouse a year after Michael. It was baddy messed up, but we got it for a song. It would have to be raised for us to be able to buy flood coverage, and the cost of that is too much. Also due to cost, we have not got any kind of coverage on it. The river is flooding right now, but it just cuts off the driveway at this depth. (I did change my camp night because I didn't feel like wading or dragging out the John boat) The river has not been in the house since we bought it. (it did get in the low part 10-15 years ago) Just once we had to move everything from underneath. But that was one scary ass day. We had 12 inches of rain and the river came up 12 feet. It fucked up enough stuff without getting in the house.
 
DoubleAtotheRON

DoubleAtotheRON

Well-Known Member
injinji said:
I think climate change and where people are allowed to build make up the bulk of the problem. If there is not a big shooting, the weather leads the news every day. It is flooding somewhere, or a town got hit with twisters, or freak snow and ice storms disrupts life every single day. Every one of those will include huge payouts for the people involved.

Here in Florida we are having serious problems with insurance companies leaving the state. Too many folks, too many hurricanes. Little Ronnie and his Large Government has set up a state system of last resort, but there is not enough money to cover the next big one. The Feds will be ask to bail us out.

Michael hit the Sandhill pretty hard. The eye was a couple three miles to the west of us. All the woods were wrecked, and all my land is woods. The payout for damage to the house was fine. It almost covered what had to be done. But the payout for "other structures" (decks, pumphouse, sheds, barns, fences, etc, etc) was capped at $25K while we had over $125K in assessed damage.

In the five years since, our rates gone up from around $1K per year to about 1.5K.

We bought the riverhouse a year after Michael. It was baddy messed up, but we got it for a song. It would have to be raised for us to be able to buy flood coverage, and the cost of that is too much. Also due to cost, we have not got any kind of coverage on it. The river is flooding right now, but it just cuts off the driveway at this depth. (I did change my camp night because I didn't feel like wading or dragging out the John boat) The river has not been in the house since we bought it. (it did get in the low part 10-15 years ago) Just once we had to move everything from underneath. But that was one scary ass day. We had 12 inches of rain and the river came up 12 feet. It fucked up enough stuff without getting in the house.
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That sucks man!… I’m gonna say it again, it’s not a climate change problem, it’s a population and structure problem. There’s always been flooding rains, hail, tornadoes, wildfires (due to lightning)…. Those things haven’t changed… we just introduced more people into a natural environment.
 
cannabineer

cannabineer

Ursus marijanus
injinji said:
Not true. There are not many leftists. Like trans people, they are about one half of one percent.
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Left is a broader category, spanning center-left, social democrats, and democratic socialists. I reserve the term far left for those who seek to collectivize the means of production, finance, communications etc. Uncompromising socialists, of whom communists were a subset in theory. In practice they (Leninists et al.) revealed themselves as fascists in a red suit.

I am unaware of a successful nation-scale socialist population in history.

My son, who has interest in nonauthoritarian sociopolitical systems, turned me onto these folks, who seem to be as close as I’ve seen. The downside to their society, as near as I can tell, is that it does not lend itself to high technology — and can only exist when bigger players let them be.

 
Tracker

Tracker

Well-Known Member
DoubleAtotheRON said:
So, why is this happening now?
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It's purely actuarial analysis. Risk of dollars out relative to dollars in. There are many factors, but it all comes down to the bottom line. They predict that dollars out is going to trend higher, so they adjust dollars in to increase accordingly. I imagine they have forecasted significantly increasing future costs. That's telling.
 
injinji

injinji

Well-Known Member
DoubleAtotheRON said:
… I’m gonna say it again, it’s not a climate change problem, it’s a population and structure problem. There’s always been flooding rains, hail, tornadoes, wildfires (due to lightning)…. Those things haven’t changed… we just introduced more people into a natural environment.
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There is more of all of the above. One of the biggest change with climate change is the speed that rain storms move over an area. It is 50% slower on average than it used to be. That means that 50% more rain will fall on any one spot under the storm. Plus with warmer air temps, there is more water in the clouds, so the rains can be harder.

With Michael, my storm, the day before landfall it was a 2 and forecast to be a strong 3 or a slim chance of a weak 4. This is at the coast where it comes ashore. I'm 60 miles from the coast, and in the past the storms had always shot their wad by the time they got to the Sandhill. I had trimmed some trees at the graveyard, and was worried about them blowing into the road. So moving those limbs was the extent of my storm prep. Michael blew up into a Cat 5 at landfall. My county had 90 minutes of 130 MPH winds. My pole barn ended up in the road.

This past season there was a hurricane that went from a Tropical Storm to a Cat 5 in one day. Things are not like they used to be.
 
DoubleAtotheRON

DoubleAtotheRON

Well-Known Member
injinji said:
There is more of all of the above. One of the biggest change with climate change is the speed that rain storms move over an area. It is 50% slower on average than it used to be. That means that 50% more rain will fall on any one spot under the storm. Plus with warmer air temps, there is more water in the clouds, so the rains can be harder.

With Michael, my storm, the day before landfall it was a 2 and forecast to be a strong 3 or a slim chance of a weak 4. This is at the coast where it comes ashore. I'm 60 miles from the coast, and in the past the storms had always shot their wad by the time they got to the Sandhill. I had trimmed some trees at the graveyard, and was worried about them blowing into the road. So moving those limbs was the extent of my storm prep. Michael blew up into a Cat 5 at landfall. My county had 90 minutes of 130 MPH winds. My pole barn ended up in the road.

This past season there was a hurricane that went from a Tropical Storm to a Cat 5 in one day. Things are not like they used to be.
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I don't want to venture too far off of subject here, and I hear what you're saying. But we've really only been tracking (with better tech) hurricanes since the 40's. Im certain that with 60,000 (or more) global flights, vehicle traffic, factories, and other emissions, that we have possibly altered the way weather behaves. But, who's to say that it isn't constantly changing? That this kind of weather pattern didn't exist in the 1600's, 900 AD, or whatever. For one, we didn't have that many people or structures on the planet to witness or record the concentration of rainfall or duration. People just took it as "fuck! it's been raining for days now!". Is it possible that it's always going to change? At least here in "Tornado Alley".. we've seen the droughts disappear over a decade ago, and Tornado Alley has seemed to have shifted to the East. We don't see near as many tornadoes as we used to. Good, regular rains for the past decade. Global warming?.. it was negative 30 here last winter. Just an opinion/theory that it will constantly evolve. Im all for cleaner air, but those planes are gonna keep flying, Cruise ships are gonna keep cruising, Shipping cargo boats, shipping trucks, and we're just putting more emissions in the air.... that part is just going to get worse. We have 9 Billion people on the planet currently, and demand for products, or travel is just going to keep ramping up.....unfortunately. Anywho, glad you made it through, and everyone was safe.

Edit: This is an interesting read... https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/historical-atlantic-hurricane-and-tropical-storm-records/
 
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DoubleAtotheRON

DoubleAtotheRON

Well-Known Member
Sorry for taking you down to Paragraph City (thanks Guns and Roses)... but to bring that whole thing back full circle, there are just simply more people, more structures that we've ever had before in history. So to see an increasing number of Insurance Companies struggle to keep up with claims is not surprising..... and then there's insurance fraud to throw in the mix. Mine was legit, so my hands are clean.:p
 
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