Our experience with insurance companies of all kinds is horrible. We’ve had the absolute worst luck although We’ve never really written about it here in detail before. Our car insurance has been canceled several times (for reasons beyond our control) and our house insurance is expensive because of a few punk kids in Fairport and a stupid AllState policy.
We’ve dealt with our high cost house insurance for 2 years because it was the best we could get at the time (thanks to AllState, jerks). We figured after living with it for 2 years things would have settled by now and we’d be able to get a better rate. Through phone calls to at least 15 different companies, we’re not gonna have any luck and it looks like we’ll be stuck with what we’re paying now: about DOUBLE what seems to be the local average.
Three reasons we’re having trouble:
- Our house is a Multi-Family Duplex. Many insurance companies simply don’t offer insurance for these types of houses. Although it reduces the number of quotes we can get, and therefor the possibility of getting a lower rate, I don’t fault them for this. It’s their company and they can choose to cover whatever types of houses they want.
- Our house was built before the turn of the 20th century (approximately 1890). It’s Old. Many companies seem to think this is just too old so they won’t cover it. I don’t get this one. Yes older houses were built using different standards and fit to different codes, but that’s the point of risk pools. Just put the old house into an appropriate risk pool. This was totally shocking to me since there’s TONS of people with houses older than ours. I hope the houses we’re building today last more than 100 years… Will they stop covering houses built in 1990 in 2109? Seems dumb.
- We have 2 Siberian Huskies. They’re awesome family dogs and very friendly. We didn’t really think anything of this, but every company we talked to categorized Huskies as an aggressive breed. What a bunch of bull. I’ve never seen a non friendly Husky and I’ve never heard of one. Their rationale seemed to be that they’re related to Wolfs. Well, hate to break it to ya guys but your Lab & Retriever dogs share the same ancestors as our Huskies… they’re all related and share some Wolf DNA. Huskies just happen to have maintained their appearance more than others due to their natural work environment.
The first 2 issues I can gloss over because not every company had those restrictions and they almost seem reasonable since a company can choose what to cover and what not to cover. The 3rd however; is inexcusable. I simply do not understand where the idea that Huskies are an aggressive breed it’s coming from.
We were just trying to get a big win by getting our yearly insurance cost lowered. It looks like this won’t be happening anytime soon thanks to yet more retarded insurance policies. The whole industry is a giant scam in my opinion. As soon as you want to USE your insurance, they drop you or raise your rates. Why can’t we lower our rates every year (or month) we DON’T use the policy?
This blog is born out of necessity. Several people I know, myself included, have been searching for good outdoor info in the Monroe County area with no luck. There’s lots of info out there, but it’s all in books and in the experts heads. This is an attempt to publicize it as much as possible.
Randy Aldrich 