The owner is a 25-year-old teacher who runs an after-school club where students play Pokémon. I’ll bet it’s taken the teacher a decade or more to build his collection. So it’s a serious investment of time and money.
And insurance — homeowner’s or renter’s — should take care of a theft of personal property, even if it’s not inside the home.
However, there are usually some limits on certain kinds of personal property. For example, guns and jewelry will often have a limit on how much a company will pay on a theft claim. Why? To limit insurance fraud from folks saying a ring is “stolen” and just pocketing the claim money.
Comic books and collectible cards (like Pokémon!) will also have a limit in a lot of policies.
So how do you make sure your Pokémon or baseball card collection is covered?
If you have a particular item or collection that you want to make sure is covered, talk to your insurance agent and ask.
I like this little ditty so much I want to hang it on my wall and protect my babies with it. Oh, wait. I did.
This is actually my second-favorite life insurance one-liner.
Our job is to ask you about life insurance. Please don’t make it our job to tell your family you didn’t have any.
Good life insurance agents have a whole arsenal of these little ditties, just waiting for the opportunity to smash through a reluctant buyer’s objections.
They’re usually designed to make people think about those left who are left behind when/if that person dies.
That’s the whole point of life insurance, after all. To protect the people left behind.
“If every wife knew what every widow knows, no one would go without life insurance.”
Do we lie in wait, just hoping to make a quick buck off an emotional buyer?
No, most of us truly believe in the truth lying behind the gutshots to the feels.
“You just died. Your family will be here in 15 minutes. What do you want me to tell them?”
I’ve mentioned it before, life insurance is the most important thing I offer. Losing your home and belongings or your car hurts and hurts bad.
I’ve seen tragic stories. Gofundme accounts have been set up for folks who lost everything they owned in a house fire, people who had a stroke, families who just lost their father and sole provider and more.
The infuriating thing is that insurance exists — the entire reason I have a job — is to prevent tragedies like these from devastating the rest of your life. And insurance does it faster and better than begging your friends and family to beg their friends and family.
Lose everything in a house fire? Good home insurance would have rebuilt your house, replaced your possessions and found you a place to live while your home was being rebuilt.
Impossibly high medical bills? That’s why medical insurance exists. A $6,000 deductible is rough, but it’s nowhere near as rough as a $200,000 hospital bill.
You have no idea how heart-breakingly frustrating it is to see a family lose their home because dad died in a car accident and know that life insurance could have saved that home, paid the bills and put the kids through college.
Yes, insurance can be expensive, I’m not going to try to tell you otherwise.
But it’s no where near as expensive as not having it.
Five years. That’s the wooden anniversary, so it’s a doubly bad pun. (I really am sorry about that.)
It’s my name on the door, but I had a lot of help keeping that door open.
It would take me a long time to name everyone to whom I owe a debt of gratitude, from family and friends to business associates and the telemarketers who have worked for me.
And that’s not even including my clients, without whom none of the rest would matter.
But while space on this blog is limitless (or very close to it), attention spans are not. Nor is the amount of time that I have to write this post.
So I must leave it as a blanket, generic “Thank you” to all of the above.
We try to make it back to my home town every year for the big Labor Day picnic in my hometown, so that’s what we did over the weekend.
The Oklahoma earthquake was a big topic of conversation, just because of the novelty in this part of Missouri. Some slept through it and some felt the walls shake a little bit.
I was asleep at home in Republic at the time. I thought I felt shaking, but I just assumed it was a passing truck or something similar. I didn’t realize it was an actual earthquake until my folks asked me whether I’d felt anything that afternoon.
It’s also the cheapest and easiest of those four disasters to fix: Usually it’s just an endorsement to your existing policy.
It’s pretty cheap to add the earthquake endorsement, (mine adds about $55 to my yearly premium) but it usually comes with a pretty high deductible: At a minimum, you’re looking at 5 percent, and it’ll probably be closer to 10 or 20 percent.
And just in case you don’t know, that’s a percentage of your dwelling amount. So if your home is insured for $150,000, a 10-percent deductible means your insurance won’t pay the first $15,000.
It’s one of the few things you buy and hope to never use.
So it makes sense to get it as cheaply as you can, right?
Not really.
Just like a fire extinguisher, if your insurance doesn’t work when you need it, then you’ve not only wasted your money, there are potentially disastrous consequences. Regardless, no one wants to pay more than they have to.
So when your rates go up (and all insurance companies, including Farmers Insurance, raise their rates some times) we all want to know why.
In the past year or so, most of the insurance companies in Missouri have raised their auto insurance rates, for two big reasons:
The high cost of gas meant fewer people were on the road, which was helping keep auto insurance rates lower. photo credit: wow. via photopin (license)
1) Cheap gas. The lower price at the pump means more people are driving.
Insurance means you’re helping pay for this guy’s claims and he’s helping pay for yours. Hopefully his rates are higher. Image courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net (license)
2) Distracted drivers. Since there are more drivers, there are even more people fiddling with their cell phones instead of paying attention to the road.
Those two factors combined mean there are more accidents, more property damage, higher hospital bills and insurance companies have to pay out more in claims.
Insurance — car, home, health, whatever — works by spreading out the pain of a claim. So you’re going to feel the pain of increased claims, even if you’ve never had to use your insurance.
So how do you keep from paying more than you have to for auto insurance?
The first was a guy who bought a shed and planned to move it to his new home in Arkansas.
Before he could get a state permit to move it, he had to show that he had $750,000 worth of liability coverage.
He called Geico (where he had his auto insurance) three times and got hung up on three times before he called me.
Simple solution: Auto insurance with a $1 million umbrella and he’s good to go.
My second example doesn’t have a simple or happy ending.
Al and I had originally started talking about moving his home and auto insurance to me last April. He just couldn’t quite bring himself to pull the trigger and switch just yet.
Unfortunately, I’m not going to be able to help him nearly as well now as I could have then.
Why? Because he’s tried to collect from his current insurance company twice in the past year.
Neither of the claims he filed are covered by his current insurance, but it doesn’t matter.
Most insurance companies don’t want you if you’ve had two claims within a three-year period.
So how would have an agent been able to help him? Because his claims were both caused by flooding. Floods aren’t covered by home insurance. An agent could have told him that before it reached the claims stage so it didn’t count against him.
I’m still in the middle of this one, so I’m not sure how it’s going to end. But as I said, it’s not going to be an easy one.
But there are four disasters that are not going to be covered unless you specifically add them.
You think it’s dreary with day after day of rain? Wait until that rain starts coming in a house without flood insurance. photo credit: Decatur FD Flood via photopin(license)
1) Flood. That’s the one that’s on everyone’s mind right now, for stuff like this and this.
Flood insurance is handled by the National Flood Insurance Program and it’s a separate policy from your regular homeowners insurance.
If you live in a 100-year flood plain, your mortgage holder will require you to buy flood insurance (and they’ll notify you of the requirement before they give you a mortgage).
As side note, a “100-year flood plain” does not mean the area’s going to flood once a century. It’s shorthand for an area that has a 1 percent or greater chance of flooding in any given year. In other words, there’s a 26 percent chance of flooding during a 30-year mortgage.
I’ve seen places on a 50-year flood plain — which means there’s a 2 percent chance of flooding in any year — flood twice in five years.
But even folks who aren’t on a flood plain need insurance: According to the NFIP, 20 percent to 25 percent of all flood claims come from low-risk areas.
2) Sinkholes. What could be worse than the ground opening up to swallow everything you own? Finding out that most home insurance policies exclude “earth movement.”
That’s kind of a big deal for those of us here in Missouri. There’s a reason the Show Me State is also known as the Cave State. See, here’s one. And all the recent rain is making them even more threatening, like this one.
There aren’t many insurance companies that will help you here. I know of two and although Farmers isn’t one, Foremost (one of the companies we work with) is. If you’re worried about a sinkhole, you may be better off with the Missouri FAIR Plan’s standalone policy for sinkholes, similar to what the National Flood Insurance Program’s flood insurance.
Most Missourians have heard of the more recent 1811-1812 flurry of quakes that were in the range of magnitude 7-8 and centered near New Madrid, Missouri. Because few people lived in Missouri in the early 1800s, impact to human life was minimal. The three major earthquakes in late 1811 and early 1812, however, did permanently change the course of the Mississippi River and created the Reelfoot Lake in the northwest corner of Tennessee.
Yeah, the largest earthquake in the country happened over on the east side of the state. Not a whole lot of people in Missouri two hundred years ago, so no biggie.
Any idea of what it would do now?
Out of the four big gaps in your home insurance coverage, earthquake is typically the easiest to fix. You just tell your agent you want to add an earthquake endorsement. It doesn’t add much to your premium — typically somewhere between $35 and $100 a year. However, the deductible is usually between 5 percent and 25 percent of your home’s value.
And in case you’re wondering, the earthquake endorsement only covers earthquakes, not sinkholes.
Yes, I’m totally just looking for a reason the show you a picture of my kids & grandkids. Aren’t they adorable? These are some of the people who will be emotionally devastated by my death. But life insurance will make sure they won’t feel it financially.
4. The death of a breadwinner.
This is the one that should be keeping you awake at night if you don’t have a policy in place to protect your family.
We like to think about our home being our biggest asset, but it’s not. Our biggest asset is our ability to earn money. If you’re not there to earn that money, what happens to the house? What happens to the people inside it?
The turning point for me came when I had to fill out a health insurance application about four years ago.
Nonsmokers got better rates, therefore I became a nonsmoker.
And if I had it there, in a contract, I was going to stick to it.
Somehow the cost per pack didn’t faze me as much as the increased cost of my health insurance.
So I understand the problem. Many smokers — especially young smokers — feel fine and enjoy smoking. They can quit any time they want to. The near-certainty of future health consequences loses out to the immediate gratification of taking a drag. And the ones that don’t feel fine figure it’s too late to quit anyway.
I’m using smoking as shorthand for all nicotine users. It’s killing you, regardless of whether you smoke it, chew it or inhale it in a vapor. Image courtesy of Mister GC at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
I was in the same trap. I’d quit later, I just didn’t feel like it yet. It wasn’t until I was going to get hit with an immediate consequence that I decided to finally and permanently quit.
So just in case you need another reason to quit, I’ve got some numbers to throw at you.
And I want you to weigh those numbers against the price of protecting your family.
The first number is the obvious one. How much are you paying for cigarettes?
Missouri is one of the cheapest states to buy smokes and it’s still $5 a pack.
At half a pack a day, that’s $75 a month.
I can get most folks — even smokers — a pretty good life insurance policy for $75 a month.
If you’re smoking a pack a day, that’s $150 a month. Depending on how old you are, we can get you an amazing policy for $150 a month. The kind that helps pay for things while you’re still alive.
Just for fun, here are some more numbers. This is how much it would cost to start a $250,000 10-year term life insurance policy for a woman throughout her lifetime, assuming she’s in average health. (BTW, I sell life insurance through Farmers, so those are the numbers I’m using here.)
A smoker is paying almost double the rate of the nonsmoker.
Why? Because she’s almost twice as likely to use the life insurance (the technical term here is “dying”).
And as she gets older, the smoking woman is more likely to develop health issues that make it harder to get life insurance.
I had a couple in my office earlier this week tell me that protecting their family was less important than their nicotine fix.
No, they didn’t actually say that. They said they couldn’t afford life insurance, but they were spending about $60 a week on cigarettes.
$60 a week? Did I hear that right?
Both the husband and wife smoke, so that’s a little less than a pack a day for each.
He probably didn’t actually say this. But it’s still a good quote.
And no, I don’t want you to wait until you quit smoking to get life insurance. Remember, the noxious weed makes it almost twice as likely that you’re going to die, so you really do need it now.
I want you to get life insurance and quit smoking. Pay for the life insurance with the money you’d set aside for cigarettes. Once you’ve quit for a year. Really and truly quit, call me again. We can send in a nicotine questionnaire and it will reduce your life insurance premium.
Then you have life insurance and money in your pocket.
And yes, I know it’s not easy to quit smoking. Even four years later, I still have cravings — I used to be a newspaper reporter and editor. A cigarette was my excuse to to go outside and gather my thoughts before I wrote or edited. So, of course, the cravings are worse when I’m writing. (Now, for instance.)
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The world as I see it 