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As the hurricane season gets underway, thousands of homeowners have started receiving unwanted letters from Allstate Insurance. The letter begins with, "We're writing to you with what we know is unfortunate news about your Allstate Insurance. The letter then went on to say, their home was being dropped from cover "because it's in the path of future hurricanes".
You may well think that this reader lives in New Orleans or Florida, but you would be wrong this reader lives in New York. The full impact of Hurricane Katrina is now being felt many hundreds of miles away from where it first made land last year. Many insurers are now scrambling to reduce their exposure to any future hurricanes that could hit their shareholders profit.
Allstate the nations number 2 insurer is canceling more than 30,000 homeowners insurance in and around the coastal counties of New York. The reason for this action they say is the the need to protect themselfs from future storms. They (Allstate) of course are not the only major insurance company to do this Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. is also no longer writing new policies on the eastern half of Long Island, N.Y.
Should we really be surprised by this type of action, no it's a strategy they have used before. In 1992 after Hurricane Andrew most of the insurers scaled back their presence in Florida. This forced thousands of local residents into using the expensive state-run insurance pool.
These companies go to great lengths to point out that a single event like Hurricane Katrina could wipe out years of savings. This they stress could very well put the entire company with all it's policyholders from all over the country at risk. There reasoning behind this policy is even though the Northeast has not had a direct hit from a hurricane in many decades, the high replacement value of homes in their portfolio would make them vulnerable.
The biggest irony for me after last year's storm is that the insurance companies had just reported a record $43 billion profit for the year 2005. The Insurance Information Institute, a trade group reported that this was an 11.7 percent increase over the previous year and was in fact the highest net income since 1991.
Why is it that we as homeowners are asked to remain loyal to these "caring companies", our friends with safe hands. We are requested to pay up ever increasing amounts of money without question every year, many of us have never made any claims, but as soon as there "could, might" be a problem we are dumped without a second thought.
If they (the insurers) spent less of our money on all that very expensive TV advertising, telling us "How Wonderful" they were going to be when we needed them the most there would be no need to cancel our policies.
What they are doing to us is "Legalized Mugging" they may as well write polices with the title no claims policy. After all we wouldn't want their shareholders to lose any sleep over the possibility of paying out on claims that could hit their profits.
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