Homeowner insurance dilemma may turn into a full blown crisis
Homeowner insurance dilemma may turn into a full blown crisis

SANTA ROSA, CA – Consumer advocates say a homeowners insurance crunch may soon become a homeowners insurance crisis as customers face huge rate increases or out-and-out cancellations. Experts say the major reasons homeowner policies get giant rate hikes or out-and-out cancellations is that their homes…
Bach Talk: Your Money or Your Life (Insurance)
Bach Talk: Your Money or Your Life (Insurance)

  As with all types of insurance, you have choices to make when shopping for life insurance. If you’re in the market for life insurance, rates are the lowest they’ve been in 20 years. That is probably because fewer and fewer employers offer it as an employee…
Dropped by your home insurer? What to do…
Dropped by your home insurer? What to do…

In some parts of the country, home insurance is not as available and affordable as in the past, so UP is working hard to help consumers shop for asset protection. Avoid wasting energy being angry or scared when your insurer “breaks up” with you… Don’t…
Why Safer Cars Don’t Lead To Cheaper Car Insurance … Yet
Why Safer Cars Don’t Lead To Cheaper Car Insurance … Yet

Many new cars sold today can take preemptive action to help prevent crashes — hitting the brakes before a collision, steering around obstacles or alerting drivers to hazards in their blind spots. Those safety features — collectively known as advanced driver-assistance systems, or ADAS —…
Options are few for storm-ravaged homes with insufficient insurance
Options are few for storm-ravaged homes with insufficient insurance

With the Atlantic hurricane season underway, homeowners should be aware that inadequate insurance coverage can make recovering from a bad situation even worse. Whether damage from a storm comes from wind or water, homeowners whose coverage is insufficient have discovered the hard way that it…
California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara Holds Malibu Town Hall
California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara Holds Malibu Town Hall

Even six months after the Woolsey Fire, some fire victims are still having difficulties collecting what they’re owed by their insurers; that includes residents with partial damage to their homes as well as those experiencing total losses. To help smooth the way, California’s top insurance…
Shaking Your Assets?
Shaking Your Assets?

If you own property in an area that’s prone to earthquakes, chances are your insurance excludes coverage for repairs and rebuilding due to quake damage. Insurance companies carved out coverage for this risk decades ago, and you have to shop and pay to add it…
Minding the Protection Gap
Minding the Protection Gap

Ever since my own home burned down in the 2003 Cedar Fire, I have worked to understand why so many people think they have a fully insured home, only to later learn they do not. This is a particularly troubling and stubborn problem because it…
Wildfire Took Your Home? Don’t Count on Insurance Rebuilding It
Wildfire Took Your Home? Don’t Count on Insurance Rebuilding It

Own a home? No doubt you’ve insured it. Very sensible of you. But if that home were, say, burned to the ground, then your insurance company probably wouldn’t cover the cost of rebuilding it. Don’t feel too bad, though. It’s only partly your fault. Two-thirds…
UP presentation to state regulators on Disasters and Insurance – Marketplace Gaps and Fillers
UP presentation to state regulators on Disasters and Insurance – Marketplace Gaps and Fillers

In this Power Point, UP Co-Founder Amy Bach and Professor Peter Kochenburger, (U.Conn Law) presented points to state regulators on the topic of insurance gaps that surface after disasters, and products to fill those gaps that may or should be available in the marketplace. November,…
Explaining to Homeowners Reconstruction Costs Versus Other Valuations
Explaining to Homeowners Reconstruction Costs Versus Other Valuations

The source of this article is a business that provides services to the insurance industry. According to a recent CoreLogic Natural Hazard Press Release, the 2018 Camp and Woolsey Wildfires in California caused devastating losses between $15 and $19 billon. Because a home is most…
North Bay floods alert businesses to uncover the quirks of their insurance coverage
North Bay floods alert businesses to uncover the quirks of their insurance coverage

As North Bay business owners directly impacted by last month’s floods push through massive recovery efforts, they’re also having to deal with the fact that part of their business insurance coverage is useless. That part of the coverage is called business interruption insurance, part of…
A dark cloud over the Sunshine State
A dark cloud over the Sunshine State

UP weighed in today with a letter to Florida state lawmakers to urge their no votes on three bills that will gut policyholder protections in that state if enacted as written.  House Bill 301, Senate Bill 714,  House Bill 751. Honorable Florida lawmakers: Our non-profit…
Your assets – Your flood risk?
Your assets – Your flood risk?

After insurers began excluding coverage for flood damage in the 1960’s, most people’s homes became unprotected for that risk. The federal government and the lending and insurance industries created the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and a requirement that homes with mortgages in high flood…
A coverage win for energy sector policyholders
A coverage win for energy sector policyholders

In a significant win for all policyholders in the energy sector, the Supreme Court of Texas reversed a lower appellate court ruling which allowed a consortium of Lloyd’s underwriters to limit their indemnity obligations to pay for defense expenses incurred by Anadarko Petroleum Corporation and…
Government shutdown is delaying flood insurance needed for home sales
Government shutdown is delaying flood insurance needed for home sales

Some 40,000 homes could be left “unsold” for each month the government shutdown lasts, according to the National Association of Realtors NAR). And in its latest monthly housing report, the NAR predicted “slower economic growth” if employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency FEMA) remain…
As wildfires drive insurance premiums up, will homeowners be able to keep up?
As wildfires drive insurance premiums up, will homeowners be able to keep up?

At first, Lucy Reynolds was unnerved by the non-renewal notice from the insurance company two years ago. Mortgaged homes must have coverage so Reynolds and her husband needed to find a replacement, quick. She was turned down by her neighbor’s carrier and an insurance agent…
Hurry up and wait? What to do when your insurer goes “insolvent.”
Hurry up and wait? What to do when your insurer goes “insolvent.”

Disasters strain insurer’s claim-paying capacity in situations where they have alot of customers in the impacted region that all make claims at the same time. The vast majority of insurers have enough money on hand to pay their claims after disasters, thanks to regulations that…