Homeowners Insurance For Florida
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If you are with Florida's state run insurance provider, your home insurance rates are going up by up to 10% this year. If you have your Florida property insurance with a private company, you'll be facing rate increases from 10-15%. However, if Florida insurance firms have their way, you may be losing significant discounts that can dramatically increase the price of your homeowners insurance.
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Currently, Florida homeowners enjoy what is known as a wind mitigation discount for assorted home features that will make your home more resistant to hurricanes. Home insurance companies have to give you this discount under Florida law along with a specific formula must be used to calculate it. It includes discounts for things like the design of your roof, whether your homes roof has a secondary backup system for removing water, the strategy used to attach your homes roof to the walls of your property, and whether or not your house has hurricane shutters among others.
Home insurance consumers in Florida have enjoyed these discounts which may be up to 50% of the wind premium on the home. However, homeowners sometimes are disappointed with those discounts as well. One homeowner who was showcased in the St. Petersburg Times invested $5,225 to strengthen the garage door as well as for hurricane shutters on his home in Spring Hill, Florida. He was very upset to find out that his $5,225 investment would only provide him a discount of $16.11! Other homeowners in Florida have saved a lot more.
Started in 2002 in addition to improvements to the Florida building code, these wind mitigation discounts were an essential step in the process to deliver lower Florida property insurance rates to those with homes more unlikely to sustain serious damage inside a Florida hurricane. Those discounts were doubled by the state of Florida in 2006 in order to provide some rate relief following the 2004/2005 hurricane season.
Right now with the approach with the 2010 Florida legislative session, property insurance companies are asking legislatures to reduce some of those discounts. In some areas the companies could have a point. For starters, there does are a certain amount of fraud related to those discounts. This fraud could be the result of homeowners misrepresentations and also due to errors inside the findings from the home inspection. The point is it could lead to homes being granted discounts they are not entitled to. Companies also point out that the doubling of these discounts in 2006 was much more of a political reaction to high rates than the usual scientific process to properly price the discount depending on the real way a property would perform within a hurricane.
Some companies are ordering and investing in new mitigation inspections to obtain a more accurate picture of the property hardening mitigation steps which were performed on your home. In case a re-inspection on your home produces discrepancies, you might lose some of your discounts and face an enormous increase in your Florida homeowners insurance premiums.
From your perspective being a homeowner, rolling back these discounts would add significantly towards the cost of your Florida property insurance. And this would happen during one of the worst recessions during our lifetimes. For a few Florida homeowners having these mitigation discounts modified or eliminated you could end up thousands of dollars in additional premium costs.
This is a critical development that all Florida homeowners should be following. Even slight changes for the mitigation discounts could cause massive increases in Florida home insurance premiums that will make the speed increases already approved look like small change!
If you are with Florida's state run insurance provider, your home insurance rates are going up by up to 10% this year. If you have your Florida property insurance with a private company, you'll be facing rate increases from 10-15%. However, if Florida insurance firms have their way, you may be losing significant discounts that can dramatically increase the price of your homeowners insurance.
Next
Currently, Florida homeowners enjoy what is known as a wind mitigation discount for assorted home features that will make your home more resistant to hurricanes. Home insurance companies have to give you this discount under Florida law along with a specific formula must be used to calculate it. It includes discounts for things like the design of your roof, whether your homes roof has a secondary backup system for removing water, the strategy used to attach your homes roof to the walls of your property, and whether or not your house has hurricane shutters among others.
Home insurance consumers in Florida have enjoyed these discounts which may be up to 50% of the wind premium on the home. However, homeowners sometimes are disappointed with those discounts as well. One homeowner who was showcased in the St. Petersburg Times invested $5,225 to strengthen the garage door as well as for hurricane shutters on his home in Spring Hill, Florida. He was very upset to find out that his $5,225 investment would only provide him a discount of $16.11! Other homeowners in Florida have saved a lot more.
Started in 2002 in addition to improvements to the Florida building code, these wind mitigation discounts were an essential step in the process to deliver lower Florida property insurance rates to those with homes more unlikely to sustain serious damage inside a Florida hurricane. Those discounts were doubled by the state of Florida in 2006 in order to provide some rate relief following the 2004/2005 hurricane season.
Right now with the approach with the 2010 Florida legislative session, property insurance companies are asking legislatures to reduce some of those discounts. In some areas the companies could have a point. For starters, there does are a certain amount of fraud related to those discounts. This fraud could be the result of homeowners misrepresentations and also due to errors inside the findings from the home inspection. The point is it could lead to homes being granted discounts they are not entitled to. Companies also point out that the doubling of these discounts in 2006 was much more of a political reaction to high rates than the usual scientific process to properly price the discount depending on the real way a property would perform within a hurricane.
Some companies are ordering and investing in new mitigation inspections to obtain a more accurate picture of the property hardening mitigation steps which were performed on your home. In case a re-inspection on your home produces discrepancies, you might lose some of your discounts and face an enormous increase in your Florida homeowners insurance premiums.
From your perspective being a homeowner, rolling back these discounts would add significantly towards the cost of your Florida property insurance. And this would happen during one of the worst recessions during our lifetimes. For a few Florida homeowners having these mitigation discounts modified or eliminated you could end up thousands of dollars in additional premium costs.
This is a critical development that all Florida homeowners should be following. Even slight changes for the mitigation discounts could cause massive increases in Florida home insurance premiums that will make the speed increases already approved look like small change!