Let me just start by saying… What a scam these people seem to have.
I’ve held this opinion for a while but this seems to be an appropriate time to voice my concern in light of the multitude of recent natural disasters we have suffered over the past few years. (To see how rough we have had it just take a look at our old video footage.)
In all seriousness we received a letter today from our home owner’s insurance company who will remain nameless (Allstate Floridian) who is informing us that they will no longer renew our policy because of the “number of hardships brought on by nature’s wrath” despite the fact that we have not had a major storm in almost 4 years and we are over 60 miles from the nearest coastline. But they have offered to take on our auto insurance policies… yea.
So why do I think that insurance is a scam? It’s really very simple. Insurance policies are really nothing more than legalized gambling. The insurance companies take your payments and they bet on the odds that you are not going to have any claims during the course of your policy. In fact if you listen to Clark Howard you know that making a claim on your home owner’s insurance at all will most likely result in your policy being canceled and may even result in you being black balled by the insurance industry. Clark even goes so far as to recommend that you never EVER make a claim unless you have a catastrophic loss. This is because you change the odds when you make a claim and by only insuring people that don’t make claims the odds are as close to 100% as possible.
For those of you in the state of Florida you remember all of the insurance companies being in a huge uproar after the 2003 hurricanes. In fact we heard from one of our clients that her father was getting out of the insurance business after 25+ years because he didn’t like dealing with all of the claims. (He hit that 1% chance and it was finally his turn to write a check.) If you ask me, 25+ years of beating the odds is a pretty good run as a gambler and I think it’s pretty sad that they would cut and run the first time they take a loss when all that time they were selling the game to so many people as being beneficial to their well-being as a homeowner and not the other way around.
But since I’m not much of a gambler myself I can understand why someone would want to get out of the game except that I think it’s a cheap excuse to say that it is because of a recent wave of something that hasn’t occurred in over 3 years. But as the song goes, “You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.” And it looks like Allstate Floridian is on the run…
Also, if you really want a good belly laugh, pull out your own policy and read it. We did this when we first bought the house and found out that we would not be covered for many things including water damage (except if it was caused by fire) or fire damage (except if it was caused by water) and the list went on and on. It really makes you wonder if paying for insurance is even a worthwhile expense if the end result is you writing checks with no real benefits if you ever have some trouble. I’d really rather dump that payment into a savings account where I can earn the interest and let that be my insurance policy… now if I can only convince my mortgage company.
Added by Sandra:
I didn’t want to comment since it might not get read – but this really ticked me off tonight! I kept walking around mumbling things about this being unreal. The funny thing – this letter was sent in an unmarked enveleope to Chris – I ALMOST ripped it in half assuming it was junk. Imagine my surprise when I opened it and read what it was. Unreal!