Christmas dinner has been put away and the used wrapping paper bagged and carried out. Many websites are now posting how and where to celebrate New Year’s Eve, and showing various retrospectives on the year in review. I think this is a great time to look back over the last 12 months, and peek into what’s coming for Texans and their home, car, health, and life insurance.
At the end of each year, there are several articles and blog posts published on end of year financial planning and moves to make. Some are written to address end of year tax moves you can take now, while others address items to rebalance your portfolio better, open an IRA, and improve your financial position now and in 2017.
I am talking with a prospective client who’s buying a condo later this month. She was unware of an option on the condo insurance quotes I prepared for her which is important because her new home has a mandatory Home Owner’s Association for the complex. In fact, regardless of whether you own or are buying a home, town house, or condo with a mandatory HOA, this one option should be included with your home insurance. It’s loss assessment coverage and it can save you thousands of dollars.
A client sent me an email asking me to quote a builder’s risk policy for a barndominium she and her husband are planning to build. I haven’t watched HGTV’s Fixer Upper series, so I called her to find out what a barndominium is, as well as to ask her the questions I needed answered to quote a builder’s risk policy for them. After finding several builder’s risk policy options for them, I began researching what companies will write a barndominium insurance policy once the construction is complete.
Sheri and I recently watched a documentary on tiny homes. We enjoyed it and talked about could we live in one, what would it look like, and whether Sheri could build it (she likes power tools). I began thinking about home insurance for tiny homes; which carriers will write a policy for that, what issues may need to be considered, and what underwriters will want to know.
518! That’s the number of earthquakes measuring 3.0 or higher in magnitude which have occurred in Oklahoma since the start of this year. A 5.0 magnitude quake struck near Cushing last week and a 5.8 magnitude tremor struck in September. Luckily it’s been almost a year since one occurred in North Texas. What’s interesting to think about is what would happen across North Texas if a quake with a magnitude of 5.8 struck here!
Nobody likes home insurance claims, but they do happen. While we may not be able to avoid claims, we may be able to prevent some of them from happening. This is especially true for the claims that aren’t caused by Mother Nature!
Does your home insurance policy ever change? Many people may be inclined to think policies don’t change, but they do. In fact, home insurance policies change all the time. Coverage is added or removed and underwriters determine that something isn’t a risk or is a huge risk much more frequently than you know.
Hurricane Matthew has come and gone and left a trail of damage in its wake stretching from the Caribbean through Virginia. Every storm leaves its own statistical imprint as Matthew did. Here are some of the numbers worth mentioning.
On Thursday, September 22, Yahoo confirmed data associated with at least 500 million user’s email accounts was breached in 2014 in what may be one of the largest data breaches ever. Some security experts think between 1 billion and 3 billion accounts may have been hacked by cyber criminals who sold the compromised date to an Eastern European nation state.
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