Yes, I realize that we live on the Gulf Coast and that our area has been hit with two hurricanes in 3 years. But…we have never filed a claim. Never.

Looking through our old insurance renewals, I noticed a trend:

2005 – $1,430
2006 – $1,528 (6.9% increase and this was a year after Hurricane Rita)
2007 – $1,655 (8.3% increase)
2008 – $1,725 (4.2% increase)
2009 – $2,072 (20.1% increase!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

And, that premium includes a couple of discounts. Now, along with those increases there were increases in the limits of liability, which is $228,000 for our home. We also have a 2% deductible for our dwelling.

It also didn’t help that we had the mold fiasco of the early part of this decade. People were getting their entire homes gutted and re-done and their insurance companies were footing the bill. Talk about a scam!

I put in a call to our insurance agent to see if some adjusting can be done. I’m not optimistic.

How much are you paying for homeowner’s insurance? What does it cover? What is your deductible?

Here’s the clincher:

It’s for a $25,000 whole life insurance policy!

This guy was unable to sleep because he was worried about his family and $25,000 of life insurance is the answer.

Anyway, the commercial piqued my interest so I went to the Colonial Penn website to look around. I found out that they also offer term insurance so I ran a quote for the heck of it. Here’s the quote I got for both a 5-year and 20-year term insurance policy for a 38 year-old man:

A $25,000 20-year term life insurance policy runs $37.25 per month. Doesn’t seem too bad does it? Well, it’s not too good when you shop around. I went to IntelliQuote.com and did a quick quote and found out that a $25,000 20-year term policy runs around $10 per month. The same $37 monthly premium would buy you a $500,000 policy!

The only difference is that there is no medical exam required with the Colonial Penn policy, which most likely is not the case with the IntelliQuote companies. Still, I don’t think the extra $27 per month is worth not having to take a medical exam.

I guess Colonial Penn has to charge so much to pay for all those commercials.

I got my renewal in the mail this week. It looks like I’m going to have to give back some of that savings.

The renewal premium is $731, which is $84 more than my policy from 6 months ago. It doesn’t seem like that much of an increase but if they do this to me every six months, I ain’t gonna be happy! If I annualize the new premium, it makes premium $1,462 per year, which is still a lot cheaper than the old policy.

I asked the agent about this and she said that Travelers raised their rates and that my renewal reflected that. Now I know why the insurance company went with a 6-month policy! Every six months they have an opportunity to raise rates.

Health plans are drawing scrutiny for offering financial incentives to entice doctors to prescribe cheaper generic medicines, including paying doctors $100 each time they switch a patient from a brand-name drug.

Pharmaceutical companies have long gone to great lengths to try to get doctors to prescribe their brand-name pills. They spend billions of dollars, plying physicians with samples, educational lunches and speaker fees. But as the patents for a growing number of blockbuster medicines expire, some health insurers are trying to trump those perks with bonuses or higher reimbursements for writing more generic prescriptions.

The idea, health plans say, is to save everyone — patients, employers and insurers — money. And many doctors argue that it’s only right to reimburse them for spending time evaluating whether a cheaper generic alternative is better or as good for a patient.

But the more aggressive approaches, such as cash rewards for each patient switched from a given list of drugs, are coming under fire for injecting financial incentives into what some patient advocates and legislators say should be a purely medical decision. Medical societies are also concerned that such rewards may put doctors in the ethically questionable position of taking a payment that patients know nothing about.

Source: Doctors Paid To Prescribe Generic Pills ($), Wall Street Journal

Call me crazy, but I don’t see what the big deal is. If a generic drug does the same thing as the higher-priced name-brand drug, what difference should it make to the patient which drug the doctor prescribes? Besides, haven’t the big drug makers been doing essentially the same thing as the health insurers by giving gifts and perks to the doctors? The drug companies aren’t doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. They’re doing it to sell more drugs. Now the insurance companies are fighting back.

Some people are calling these payments unethical. I would say that they’re only unethical if the generic drug is inferior to the name-brand drug. Right?

Bottom line: I’m for anything that will lower the price of healthcare.

Today’s Getting Going column, Protecting Your Assets in Case You Find Yourself in Court (Free), reminded me of my own story…

Several years ago I was involved in a fairly minor fender-bender. The lady that I ran into (the accident was my fault) got out of the car and was standing on the side of the road. She appeared to fine, just a little put out by the whole deal. She was a runner for a local dental office and the car belonged to her employer. Anyway, she told me that she had been involved in another accident not to long before our accident.

Everything seemed to be fine and dandy and I had actually forgotten about the deal until a year later when I got a call from my insurance company telling me that I was being sued. The lady claimed her foot was broken during the accident and that she was suffering from a back injury. I was both scared and ticked off! Her foot was perfectly fine when she was standing on the side of the road! Her lawyer was a TOTAL jerk (as most of those kinds of lawyers are). I could tell that they were just looking for a nice little payday and that this suit was bogus.

Anyway, the case was eventually settled for a relatively small sum of money but it scared the daylights out of me. I mean, what could have happened if this case had gone to court and a judgment was found against me that beyond what my insurance company would pay? I could have lost my entire CD collection! LOL!

Seriously though, Jonathan’s column offers up five ways that people can protect themselves:

1. Get a personal umbrella policy. This is a no-brainer. You’ll have to increase your auto coverage before you can purchase an umbrella policy. However, once you do that, you’ll find that the umbrella policy will only cost you $200 – $400 per year. That’s cheap insurance.

2. Max out your retirement plans. According to the article, your 401(k) should be protected from creditors. I’m not sure why the word “should” is thrown in there but it is.

3. Know your state’s laws. Jonathan suggests typing in your state’s name and the words “asset protection” to find out more information on your particular state. It might also be worth it call your attorney and ask them the basics.

4. Consider owning assets jointly with your spouse. Consult your attorney before you make any title changes because some changes could mess up your estate plan.

5. For those who have assets of $5 million or more. Clements suggests looking into more sophisticated protection like trusts, limited partnerships and limited-liability companies. For those, you’ll definitely need an attorney.

Clements also mentions a book that might be helpful on this topic: Asset Protection: Concepts and Strategies for Protecting Your Wealth (Affiliate Link). I haven’t read this book.

My first, quick-tempered reaction was, “What the hell do I have insurance for?” I realize that’s an immature response but consider this:

I remember putting on an entire roof with architectural shingles just a few years ago for $200 less than that deductible! I’m sure that roofing materials have gone up in price since then but I’m not sure how much.

This is what stinks about insurance. We have been in our house 8 years, NEVER filed a claim, and yet our rates keep going up. Of course it doesn’t help that we live in an area that was hit particularly hard by the mold BS that happened several years ago. It also doesn’t help that we suffered a hurricane in 2005. Still, these rates seem a bit extreme especially when you consider the fact that our premium was around $850 per year not too many years ago.

My insurance agent is working on getting the limits of liability reduced, which should drop our premium and deductibles some (the deductible is a percentage of the limits of liability). I’ll let you know what the final premium is as soon as I find out.

UPDATE: I guess it could always be worse.