Say WA? Evergreen State ping
FReepmail sionnsar if you want on or off this ping list.
Ping sionnsar if you see a Washington state related thread.
ping-a-ding-ding!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1641477/posts
Home Insurance Cancelled...You Too?
y'all just don't try to move to philly. it's already too congested here.
Say WA? Evergreen State ping
FReepmail sionnsar if you want on or off this ping list.
Ping sionnsar if you see a Washington state related thread.
I think the word "jolt" would be more appropriate in this case.
All over the world the last couple of decades you've really seen an explosion of studies of paleoseismology - dating and studying past earthquakes by digging trenches through faults, extending well beyond human written records in time.
It's proven quite valuable in identifying risk, especially in areas that have had civilized settlement for a very brief time, like Seattle, Salt Lake City - but it's clear Insurance companies are taking a look at the information and going "Holy Crap, there's a lot more risk here than I thought."
Good. Insurance is the biggest scam in the world anyway.
Ruh-roh!
Insurance works like this...
You estimate the probability of a claim being filed and the amount of the claim, then you set your premiums such that you can make a profit even if the claim gets filed.
Now, if the probability of the claims and the amount of the claims are such that you must charge a premium that is either unreasonable (won't get customers) or insufficient, you are going to lose money.
You could always bump up the premiums of others who have less risk but then, that is called socialism.
Perhaps what needs to happen is to simply prohibit mortgage companies from requireing insurance.
That or simply allow mortgage companies to make loans without requiring insurance.
what did these people expect? You cant live on the ocean front (or in a earthquake area in this case) without having consequences. Deal with it.
Maybe they know something we don't.
Don't forget that the deductible on most of these earthquake plans is so high that they are almost meaningless to people who don't have a lot of assets.
The deductible was too high anyway.
I have Allstate, but they funnel that insurance through the state in CA.
My house in Olympia was damaged in the Nisqually earthquake. Our neighborhood was close to the epicenter. A house up the block was one of the handful that was totally destroyed.
That was something. I walked through downtown Olympia an hour or so after the quake. I will never forget watching the cops out with their dogs looking for people who had been squished under the large piles of fallen rubble. By some miracle, no one was.
Fortunately, I had earthquake insurance. The insurer claimed my policy had a deductible of 10% of the value of my house. I copied my policy and sent it to them, showing them that they had left the little space where they were supposed to put that information blank. According to the fine print on the policy, that meant the deductible was really only $500.00. The insurer grumbled, but payed.
My family had to live elsewhere for a couple of weeks while the contractor fixed the house. The insurer paid for us to rent a condo on the beach in Ocean Shores. Worked out great.
I figure our area is probably safe now for 20 or 30 years. . . .
But there's a catch. There's a 15% deductible. But that's on the total cost of the home, not on the cost of the damage.
I noticed that another insurer offered an earthquake policy from the same place. The agent from this other company misstated the true nature of the deductible.