It’s time to insure your home insurance. Do they sell policies like that? Floridians might need them if the hurricanes keep coming, the rates keep rising and companies keep evacuating from the state.
I’ve been listening to my mother talk about this quite a bit recently. Her homeowner’s insurance in Tampa went up $1,000 this year, and there’s another increase looming. She wants to sue them, not for price gouging or raising rates, but specifically for being jerks. I don’t know that it will stand up in court.
So I tell her insurance is a business, and all businesses need to make money, but she’s not listening. Then it occurs to me: What am I doing defending insurance companies? My rates are going up, too.
But it’s all made me much more interested in my own policy, specifically what is and isn’t covered. If you’ve never read the excluded losses in your policy, take a look as it’s not only critical, but also fascinating. I read mine the other day and wondered if they had been written expressly for me as a way to head off stupid, house-damaging things I do.
Strange stuff I thought only happened to me is on there, like this uninsured loss: “settling, cracking, bulging, shrinkage or expansion of the structure.” Shoot, that’s been known to happen all on the same weekend at my house. Plus elongating and elevating.
Others were entertaining to imagine, like “Earth movement” and “bird, vermin or house pests.” I like to think I have a pretty creative mind, but I failed to think of any scenarios where birds might cause catastrophic damage to a house. Maybe by smoking in bed, but that’s excluded on a separate line.
A few items just didn’t seem to go together, for instance, “wear and tear or smog.” Are they somehow related? Is smog not caused by car exhaust as we were taught, but really scuffing your feet on the floor? And since when is smog dangerous to your house? Does it throw out-of-control house parties?
Some are common sense. Mold and fungus are not included losses, and that’s to be expected with all the problems insurance companies are having with mold claims. But what about this one: “smoke from agricultural or industrial operations?” Someone’s got to explain that one to me. The only agricultural operation I know of in a house is marijuana growing, and that would explain the smoke.
I wish someone would explain how these exclusions came about. Is it the work of some attorney who sits up late at night thinking up strange losses that shouldn’t be covered? “A-ha! What about spontaneous combustion of the family gerbil?”
Or have these all happened? That makes me even more curious. If only the insurance company put a little paragraph for each telling us why it’s being excluded. Something like: “Losses stemming from cattle are no longer covered due to a 1998 incident in the home of Edward P. Little in Tupelo, Kansas. A period of drought and abnormally high temperatures was affecting the breeding cycles of his cattle. To rectify this, Little turned his living room into what he called ‘the breeding bodega.’ Little spent three weeks in intensive care and his house was a total loss.”
Give me something like that and I will be much more understanding.
Quite clear, but a bit unnerving, was this uninsured loss: “war, nuclear reaction or radioactive contamination.” You can’t buy a smoke detector to prevent that one, and it made me wonder if buying a .50-caliber machine gun would get me a discount on my policy.
But if nuclear was is on there, why not other rare events like alien invasion, mad-as-heck demons, ghosts, pirates, drunk clowns, a super hero war fought on your front porch or a baby diaper pail explosion.
That last one’s a bigger threat in my house than “smoke from agricultural operations.” And it could be far more damaging than a hurricane.