State Farm sent us a letter this week that they will be sending out an inspector soon. I imagine that we will fail the inspection. Every tree on our property is healthy, the neighbors, not so much. The house is made of wood, the deck is made of wood, the trees are made of wood. We are screwed, and it took State Farm 23 years of premiums to pay attention?
Well, from what we have heard many of the big guys State Farm, Farmers, Allstate and such are sending out letters raising rates (both in town and the mountains) and in some case giving you an ultimatum to clear the trees or you will not be insuarable.
For the past almost 12 years now we have been with either Hartford or Safeco as their rates were much lower than that others before that we were with Farmers.
We work with an agent out of Evergreen that deals with many companies and he is very nice and easy to work with below is his information if you want to give him a call please tell him Kim from Mountain Dollar sent you his direction.
Bill Emmerich
ELKSTONE INSURANCE GROUP, INC.
PO BOX 2406
EVERGREEN, CO 80437-2406
303-670-3773
We have Amica insurance and all they have done is make suggestions on what we might do for fire mitigation on our property. They have never suggested cutting down live trees. Our rates go up a very modest amount each year. I have had them for over 30 years and have no complaints about their rates or their service.
Your welcome we just got our premium notice about a month ago and it stayed the same yeah!!!
We have our home and all the cars through Safeco now and have no complaints when we got hail damage on one of the cars and truck (same storm) they were out right away to look at them. We only had to pay one deductable since it was the same storm and both were in the same parking lot. Other than that we have only had glass (windsheild) claims in the past 12 years.
We had some wind damage to our roof but to fix it did not hit the $1000.00 deductble but they (Safeco) did offer to send out a person to take a look at it so make sure the roofing company was in line with what they said it would cost.
PLEASE call your individual agencies and have a dialogue with them about this issue......I just was informed that most of the BIG
players are floating this idea thru the industry......IF they get enough "push back" from their customers perhaps it will die a natural
death and "go away"...... (STATE FARM was mentioned as one of the "floaters")
Floaters? Makes sense, it also makes sense to find a company that doesn't screw you over on conditions.
My dad is still pissed at me for cutting the trees back away from the house. He liked to watch the Chickadees from the kitchen window when he was drinking his morning coffee.
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
Several years ago we made an appointment for Platte Canyon to come out and do a mitigation survey of our property. Jeff Davis and another individual came out and took a look at things. They used the mandatory requirements for a new build but because we were an existing build the regs weren't mandatory for us. They measured driveway width, slope of land, checked for fire engine clearance and turn around ability in the driveway, walked the whole property taking notes, etc. The only suggestion they had was to make a 5 foot burn barrier all around the house. They said the big pines at 3 corners of the house were not a problem as there were no ladder fuels. The survey was several pages long and they gave us a copy of it, including their suggestion and the ok for the pines. We took pictures of the burn barrier when completed, attached them to a copy of the survey, and sent it to our State Farm agent. He said we were good to go
