A client of mine sent me an email over the weekend letting me know he’d sold his car and had not replaced it yet. Since he’s engaged, he’s sharing his fiancé’s car until he replaces the sold one in the next couple of weeks. He asked an excellent question I run into from time to time; should he cancel his car insurance until he buys a replacement?
Hurricane season runs from June 1 through the end of November. Hurricane forecasters at Colorado State University climatologists and the Tropical Storm Risk group in London predict a lighter than normal hurricane season for 2014. Both groups believe this due to cooling in the Atlantic Ocean and the re-emergence of El Nino. CSU forecasters predict 9 named storms with 3 hurricanes, 1 severe with winds greater than 110 miles per hour, while Tropical Storm Risk predicts 12 named storms, including 5 hurricanes with 2 being intense.
It’s hard to believe but summer’s only 5 weeks away and that means summer vacations are almost upon us. One of the questions I’m asked a couple of times a year by a client is whether or not their car insurance covers a rental car. It’s usually asked by someone who’s getting ready to go on a trip and rent a car in their destination.
On March 22nd, a hillside that was saturated with water from earlier rains gave way. A wall of mud, trees, and debris swept over the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River and covered an unincorporated area known as Steelhead Haven located 4 miles east of Oso, Washington. Mud, trees, and other debris covered an area of Steelhead Haven measuring 1,500 feet long, 4,400 feet wide and between 30 and 40 feet deep, roughly 1 square mile.
A friend of a friend called me a couple of weeks ago who wanted my professional opinion. Our mutual friend suggested he call me as he’d been in an accident a couple of months ago and was not happy with the way his claim was being handled. He’s not a client but wanted to know what his options were.
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.
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.
Flood insurance popped up on the national news feeds in late March of this year. The Biggert-Waters Flood Reform Act of 2012 (BW-12) went into effect in October of 2013 impacting home and business owners along coastal areas of the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean, as well as in the Missouri River Basin (see http://50.87.248.161/~wiseinsu/flood-insurance-reform-act-of-2012/).
Chevrolet and its parent company, General Motors, have been in the news a lot lately. In February they recalled more than 1.6 million small cars due to faulty ignition switches, and announced another recall of 1.5 million vehicles on Monday, March 17. The ignition switch defect is attributed to 12 deaths and culminated in multiple investigations.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of working with two retired people in the Dallas / Fort Worth area. What they have in common is quite admirable, they own their homes outright. One paid off the mortgage while the other person paid cash for their current home. That, however, is where the similarities end. The person that paid off their mortgage dropped their home insurance when the mortgage was paid in full, while the person that paid cash for their home continues to maintain a home insurance policy.
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