Tag: Dallas / Fort Worth

The Top 4 Home Insurance Claims for Texas

Texas home insurance rates continue to climb and remain the highest in the country. The two reasons most insurance companies give for Texas having the highest rates are weather and the cost of claims. The top four types of home insurance claims as reported in a Texas Department of Insurance study are hail, water damage, hurricane winds, and fire. The combined total insurance companies paid out in claims was over $25 billion. Individually, hail claims accounted for $7.6 billion, water damage was $7.3 billion, hurricane winds was $6.2 billion and the amount paid for fire claims was $4.3 billion.

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Avoid a Home Insurance Claim this Winter

Winter’s here, and in north Texas, that means some cool to moderate temperatures with some hard freezes thrown in, and just maybe, some snow or an ice storm. With that in mind, let’s examine what you can do to avoid a home insurance claim this winter, which will keep your rates down for years to come.

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Credit, Delinquency, and Insurance

Last week, numerous web sites carried the news story, wrote blog posts, and print articles on the Urban Institute’s study that 35% of all Americans are delinquent on their debt and getting to know their debt collectors on a first name basis. If you live in the Dallas metropolitan area, the news is even worse.

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Texas Car Insurance Rates Rise

If you think Texas car insurance rates are on the rise, it’s not your imagination. Based on a report released earlier this year by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, Texas premiums now rank 11th highest in the nation. Two years ago, we were ranked 14th highest in the nation. The average Texas car insurance premium, based on the 2009 data used for the NAIC report (the most recent nationwide data available), is now $1,022 a year. The national annual average rate is $901.

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Home Insurance and a Roof’s Impact

Most people usually don’t think about their roof unless there’s been a recent hail storm or a damp spot appears on a room ceiling. As long as it’s not leaking, we tend to ignore it even when we see it pulling into the driveway. This past week roofs have been the subject of three conversations, two were with clients and the other with a Dallas realtor on behalf of a client with an offer on a home.

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Where You Live Impacts Your Car Insurance Rate

Yahoo Autos posted an article by Justin Hyde on February 5th of this year listing the top ten cities in the U.S. with the highest car insurance rates. One of the two points raised by Justin is that car insurance rates are impacted by where you live more than by how you drive.

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Hail Claims and Roofers

One of my clients in Frisco, Texas sent me an email last weekend. Her family’s home is located in a neighborhood that was struck by hail, some of it measuring between baseball and softball size. A flurry of roofers showed up in their neighborhood and began knocking on doors to solicit business and my client wanted to know if she should file a hail claim.

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Information Needed for a Commercial Insurance Quote

Over the last few months, I’ve worked with a number of small businesses around the Dallas / Fort Worth area regarding their commercial insurance. In each case, I begin the conversation by letting them know that getting a commercial insurance quote is much different than getting a quote for car insurance. In order to provide them with an accurate quote there are several items of information I need to gather to present to each of the underwriters I work with.

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Car Insurance and Population Growth

Texans have long proclaimed that everything is bigger in Texas! If you look at the population growth numbers for the top ten metropolitan areas from July 1, 2012 to July 1, 2013, that’s been especially true for Texas. In a Dallas morning news story published on Thursday, March 27, Texas has two of the top ten metropolitan areas in the country. They are Houston and Dallas / Fort Worth.

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Special Event Insurance Policies

The floor for the Final Four is laid and ready at AT&T Stadium, the home of the Dallas Cowboys. Additional seating has been added, the concert venue has been prepped and the countdown to the tip off for the NCAA’s Final Four is well underway. College basketball’s flurry of activity to crown a national champion is one of the biggest sporting events of the year, only rivaled by the NFL’s Super Bowl.

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