Over the past 23 years I’ve paid in over 35,000 in homeowners insurance to Erie and made one 300 claim which they paid $ 120 of after the deductible 16 years ago, and now this claim which will be approx $700 after the deductible. I have a hard time viewing myself as a petty “nickle and dime” chiseler driving them to insolvency for making a covered claim given this history.
When we signed on with the local branch of our insurance company, the owner met with us for a discussion of the policy, etc. He made a point of cautioning us about making claims for small amounts, since, at the very least, it would cause our rates to go up and possibly result in cancellation. What’s a small amount? Basically, anything you can pay out of pocket without causing yourself financial harm. Insurance companies are scum, but at least this guy was honest about things. His philosophy is to keep customers paying premiums for the long term rather than fucking them over in the short term.
Have you considered increasing your deductible? Think how much you’d have saved over those 23 years, or in the next 23 years. Almost certainly enough to pay for the replacements you’ve gotten many times over.
That’s funny, I thought that as well as making money, a company was supposed to provide a service that justified earning that money, and that if they don’t provide that service, they should be closed down.
As has been mentioned, your premium is probably going to increase. Over the course of 1-3 years, you’re probably going to pay more than what you’re going to get. Are you even sure you’re going to get full purchase value for these things? A 2-week old laptop is different than a hasn’t-been-opened-it-was-stolen-on-the-way-back-from-best-buy laptop, that sort of stuff.
Erm… by who? Should the makers of the Pet Rock have been “closed down”? TeleBrands? None of their products work as advertised.
ETA: If the laptop is actually brand new and you bought it on a Visa you may be able to get them to replace it for you.
Well, maybe not… but they will view the OP with some suspicion for a few years.
Anecdote: I’d had auto insurance through a company for 20+ years. Off and on, we had renter’s insurance, then homeowners’ insurance, through the same company. “On”, we’d had homeowner’s insurance for 13+ years. Then we sold our townhouse in favor of upgrading to a detached house.
Not quite 3 years earlier, I was at work one day when the kids’ nanny called me and said “I think your chimney is in your back yard”. Yep, it had blown off the roof. That was an expensive insurance claim (nearly 3 grand).
A little over a year prior to the move, Typo Knig’s car was broken into at work. 600+ dollars worth of damage to the car, and his portable CD player and stack of CDs were liberated. We ran those through the homeowners’ insurance.
Then we were getting ready to move, so I called the insurer to see about setting up the policy for the new place. “Ohhhhhh, we’re not so sure about that” was the response, since we’d had several claims. “We’ll have to send this one up to the underwriting committee!!”.
Terrified, I started calling around to insurance agents, all of whom told me “LEPER!! UNCLEAN!!!”. One said “well, your best bet is to hope the current company will write you a policy”. I believe otherwise, we’d have had to go into some sort of high-risk pool that would have covered the structure only (for the lender’s benefit).
Anyway - long story short, the current insurer looked and realized we’d been customers since forever, and decided we were still worth risking, and wrote a policy. As far as we could tell, our rates didn’t jump either (they were of course higher because of the bigger house).
Oh - and with the two claims, we weren’t jacked around at all, either time. The first time, we had the repair done beforehand because, well, it wasn’t safe to live in the house without heat, without proper furnace venting etc. The repair people actually said part of the work was from the wind, and part was from shoddy construction (quite believable in that house), and only about half of the cost was directly attributable to the wind damage. The insurer paid the full amount anyway.
With the car break-in, we simply provided an affidavit of what had been stolen. We weren’t asked for receipts or anything. I think that since what we listed was believable / reasonable, they didn’t fight it. Now, if we’d tried to claim for the Rembrandt we’d left sitting in the back seat, who knows…
My dad used to have a flat in England with a separate garage. The garage was broken into one day, and his (fairly old, but not in the even-more-expensive sense) Porsche was stolen, along with his golf clubs.
The insurance company believed he had a Porsche, but didn’t believe he had Callaway golf clubs. :smack:
Baba Yaga, is that you?
Well, he almost certainly had documentation (title, bill of sale, etc.) on the car. But not so likely for the golf clubs.