We are scheduled for a meeting tomorrow with our homeowners insurance agent, who works for State Farm. I’ve been busy gathering data, and it has taken me places I did not know I would go. I won’t give our personal numbers here, but the keys to our insurance are two: our location, and the “replacement cost” that is used to calculate the face of our policy and our annual premium.
I was first triggered by seeking a quote from Allstate, the only other insurer now operating in the front range, the so-called “foothills” on the eastern face of the Colorado Rockies. State Farm used the number $350 psf (per square foot) in determining our premium, Allstate used $240, and said we needed far less coverage than we were getting from State Farm. As insurance goes, that doesn’t matter much, as Allstate charges a much higher rate per 100K, but set that knowledge aside. The information we got from Allstate was useful. The difference, it appears, is that State Farm applies its $350 number to our entire square footage, where Allstate uses a lower number for basement footage, one-third of our square footage, which is far cheaper to replace.
That in mind, I got on the Internet yesterday to seek out some quotes, knowing we are redlined so that most insurers cannot write policies here. But they do not know that right away when we encounter their sales mechanism on the tubes, so they will, at the outset, give us honest numbers.
I came across Farmers Insurance, which does not write policies up here, and its agent blindly went through the data gathering process, and after coming up with a replacement cost of $285 psf interrupted the process and said, my words, “Hey, wait a minute. We can’t write a policy for you. You’re in the fire zone!” I said yeah, I knew that, I told your person that. He advised have a nice day.
Why are so many people concerned with the kind of day I should have?
