Friendly letter from State Farm Insurance today- Snowbirds beware!

[Snubby]

I found out early on about State Farm, had a single vehicle accident that amounted to a little over $2,000.00 in damages. I was a teenager then an on my mother's policy, they dropped her insurance after 17 years and this was the first claim. And to boot, when they finally agreed to fix the truck they put used parts on it from a salvage yard!

[SeaRay]

It pays to check out rates every so often. I have a good friend who is a Nationwide agent. I had my homeowners and 2 cars with him. They draft a monthly payment for my auto coverage and after several years of no or modest increases it jumped about $80/month or almost a $1000/Yr.
I called him and told him I would have to check other rates. He understood and said he would also check for better rates. Up until that point, I thought all he could sell was Nationwide policies.
I had found coverage that was about $10 more than I was currently paying, but he called me and said he could change my homeowners and auto to Travelers. The homeowners was about $75 more per year but he auto was $30 less per month than what I was currently paying and $110 less than the new Nationwide rate.
Well, that was a no brainer and ended up actually reducing my premiums. The coverage was identical to my existing coverage, he made sure of that.
So it pays to check this stuff every so often.

[vfourmax]

I can relate to the having the same homeowners policy for years. Same here and actually mine is through Allstate and they do not even offer the policy terms I have on their new policies and they have been tryng for close to ten years to get me to switch to a newer policy but the newer policies are less coverage for the same or higher rates so I politely decline.

They have been steadily increasing my rates each year now for about the last 5 years and my rates are now just about double what they were 5 years ago for the same policy but it is still better rate/coverage wise than what the new policies are offering.

I have changed auto and motorcycle policies several times for rate increases over the years and I have not had any sort of claim on any policy of any type in over 30 years.

As far as insurance is concerned as a customer you are nothing more than a potential liability, that company is just keeping its fingers crossed that they take your money that they do not need to pay out a nickle to you.

You may have a super nice agent but that agent can do no more than what the company allows regardless of what he tells you.

That is why the company has an underwriting department is to review and approve or reject every application that comes in for a new policy. They weigh the risk in every application and if it looks to be skewered against the companies acceptable risk/reward criteria that is used for evaluation the application will be rejected and it could happen as long as a month after the initial application is submitted.

I had that happen one time, the letter I received stated That due to the high performance nature of your Yamaha R1 motorcycle this policy has been cancelled by the underwriting department effective immediately. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.Thank You.
Funny part was I had the agent run the application with the vin to get the rates to be sure there was no confusion on the model before I bought the new bike because it was such a good rate and they accepted it and the bike had my insurance in force on it 3 days before I actually bought it and picked it up.

Never take ANYTHING for granted concerning an insurance policy or claim.