Homeowners Insurance For Florida
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If you're with Florida's state run insurance provider, your home insurance rates are getting up by as much as 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 providers have their way, you may be losing significant discounts that could dramatically increase the expense of your homeowners insurance. Read More Presently, Florida homeowners enjoy what is known a wind mitigation discount for assorted home features that make your home more resistant to hurricanes. Home insurance companies must give you this discount under Florida law along with a specific formula can be used to calculate it. It includes discounts for things like the design of your roof, whether your roof has a secondary backup system for removing water, the techniques used to attach your homes roof to the walls of your home, and whether or not your house has hurricane shutters and others. Home insurance consumers in Florida have enjoyed these discounts which is often up to 50% of the wind premium over a 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 boost 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 far more. Started in 2002 in addition to improvements to the Florida building code, these wind mitigation discounts were a significant step in the process to supply lower Florida property insurance rates to those with homes more unlikely to sustain serious damage in the Florida hurricane. Those discounts were doubled from the state of Florida in 2006 to be able to provide some rate relief following the 2004/2005 hurricane season. At the moment with the approach of the 2010 Florida legislative session, property insurance companies are asking legislatures to reduce some of those discounts. In certain areas the companies might have a point. For starters, there does appear to be a certain amount of fraud connected with those discounts. This fraud can be the result of homeowners misrepresentations and in addition due to errors inside the findings from the home inspection. In any event it could lead to homes being granted discounts they're not entitled to. Companies also mention that the doubling of these discounts in 2006 was much more of a political response to high rates than the usual scientific process to 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 house 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 a huge increase in your Florida property insurance premiums. From your perspective like a homeowner, rolling back these discounts would add significantly for the cost of your Florida homeowners insurance. And this would happen during one of the worst recessions during our lifetimes. For many Florida homeowners having these mitigation discounts modified or eliminated could result in thousands of dollars in additional premium costs. This is a critical development that Florida homeowners ought to be following. Even slight changes for the mitigation discounts might lead to massive increases in Florida property insurance premiums that will make the pace increases already approved look like small change! |
