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.
Unless you’ve totally unplugged from all news media and the internet over the past week, you’ve heard of the Heartbleed bug. The Heartbleed bug (it’s not a virus) is a vulnerability in the OpenSSL library, the software that makes your website and other sites secure when a person is reviewing banking records, making a purchase from your company, or updating their information or method of payment in their on-line account.
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.
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.
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/).
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.
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.
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