Entries from February 2010 ↓

As someone looking around for a house to buy, the cost of insurance is not always the most important thought on your mind. Even if you do think about it, the most common consideration is the state of repair and how easy it would be to repair or rebuild should there be a fire. This calm confidence tends to continue when buying the insurance policy. You sign up for an all-perils policy and take the words at face value. If you are insured against all perils, that surely means you can sleep peacefully at night. Except that confidence is too often misplaced. Looking around the US right now, it’s one of the coldest winters on record with heavier snow fall than usual. When the weather warms, the melting snow will flood into the rivers. . . That’s a joy to come. So let’s list the most common events that damage your home: landslides, subsidence, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes. Live in the wrong states and we add earthquakes. Now take out your policy and check that exclusion clause. You will see magic phrases like “surface water”. That excludes every possible source of water no matter whether it comes in as a high tide, wind surge, rain or local sewage drains backing up. When you add up everything not included, even the top-of-the-range policies from the supposedly best insurers often end up as covering rebuilding costs from fire and wind only – that’s wind and not tornadoes or hurricanes. Continue reading →

In most states, car insurance rates are likely to go up for at least 3 years if you are convicted of drunk-driving. You will also become familiar with SR-22.

Different states use different terms for drunk driving: driving under the influence, driving while intoxicated or operating a vehicle while intoxicated. If convicted of any such offense, your insurance rate is likely to go up before you can drive again.

If convicted of impaired driving in any US state, your driver privileges will be suspended for between 30 days and a year.

To get your license and privileges back, you’ll need to complete an SR-22 form to prove you have liability insurance. The insurance company will notify the licensing agency if the policy is terminated for any reason. Continue reading →

It seems everyone came back from Copenhagen with a simple message to sell. Stop thinking about global warming. The real danger is climate change. So, to prove the point, 2010 has started off with some of the coldest weather we’ve seen for decades. Take Florida as an example. Miami set a new record for cold – the old record was set in 1927. The last time South Florida saw snow was in 1977. And what was true for the South proved equally true the further North you moved. This had an interesting effect on fuel prices. Natural gas was suddenly more expensive and homes with heating systems using oil got a nasty shock. It’s the old story of supply and demand and, guess what, the price of crude oil was lifting gently past $80 per barrel. So, if the natural gas supplies were under pressure and everyone wanted to stay warm, the refineries switched more production away from gas for vehicles. The result? We’re back up to $3 a gallon for premium-grade gas and the national average for unleaded is creeping up to $2.88. The economists who predict what’s going to happen to the commodities markets over the next six months are predicting the price of gas will keep on rising. Unleaded will soon tip the $3 mark. If we’re lucky, we won’t get back up to the $4 we enjoyed in 2008. We managed to get through that because it was before the recession hit and the credit crunch took away our easy money. Now the credit limits have been downsized and housing equity plans have dried up, there’s no slack left in the household budgets if all the fuel prices stay high. Continue reading →