Insurance 'nightmare' unfolds for Florida homeowners after back-to-back hurricanes
Insurance 'nightmare' unfolds for Florida homeowners after back-to-back hurricanes
Many victims facing catastrophic losses due to water damage “are just walking away.”
there is absolutely nothing in florida that makes it worth living there
Florida is like an old used car: cheap upfront costs but expensive maintenance costs.
Florida is like an old used car: cheap up front costs for a dangerous vehicle that you know will eventually fall apart but you act surprised when you lose a ball joint in your front suspension on the highway while doing 120 kph because you ignored your mechanic for the fourth time this year. The look on your face as your car crosses the median and you're about to impact a cement truck.
They do have a first-class spaceport... Watching a rocket takeoff from there would be the only reason I ever go to Florida.
i went to see a launch in early 00's. it is interesting, maybe worth a trip, but not worth moving there
Alligators tell me otherwise. In fact, they tell me they look forward to having it back to themselves soon.
I lived in Louisiana. Although surely they can and periodically do cause harm they really want nothing to do with you. Just don’t screw with one and you’re fine.
Florida needs to stop rebuilding in the barrier islands. It's unfortunate for the people that live there, but this is going to keep happening over and over again.
Just plant mangroves and let them do their job of protecting the mainland.
Stop building on the coasts in general. leave them as natural barriers and wonders, rather than having a 800 foot tall hotel 3 feet from the seawater.
One 800 foot hotel is way better than the 10 80 foot hotels that usually get built.
This is why insurance should be nationalized as part of your taxes.
Anyone thats not a brainwashed rightwing lunatic would see that paying 100-300 dollars a year on taxes would be a hell of a lot better than 100+ dollars a month just to buy a CEO a golden parachute and another yacht
But as long as right wing lunatics are out there literally hunting aid workers and evaluators, its never gonna happen.. because they want misery, pain, and destruction. its why Project 2025 wants to get rid of all of it.
I agree with nationalized healthcare insurance, but I don't know if I agree with using taxes to fund an underwriting account for houses in Florida that are guaranteed to get destroyed year after year.
Hurricanes are not getting smaller. Continuing to rebuild in Florida seems like building in the shadow of a smoking volcano.
So just stop helping people in florida specifically?
Or we just gonna go full republican hatemonger and tell everyine from California earthquakes, To Midwestern Tornados, to Northern Blizzards, and more, to just get bent and that they should have thought to live somewhere without regular disasters? That they deserve what happens to them for "choosing" to live there?
Even making it a state plan would work better in Florida than what we currently have. They let private insurers cherry pick the less risky houses, and cover whoever is left with the state plan. Then those private for profit insurers take the premiums, pay big bonuses to themselves, dissolve the company and leave, rinse and repeat. It's a scam.
The cherry picking is usually a compromise to keep the companies operating in the state at all. If the state says a company must offer coverage for all perils for the entire state or leave entirely, it doesn't take an underwriter to know Florida is a bad bet. There are similar carve outs for windstorm coverage in other gulf coast states, and I think for wildfire coverage on the west coast.
Edit: I couldn't find anything about a single peril state plan for California, but this article describes some of the recent insurance issues in the state: https://apnews.com/article/california-home-insurance-wildfire-risk-premiums-047bdfa514ce93dac83c82735a15554a
Believe me, I'm with you. But a complication to this is that insurance companies employ millions of people. Nationalizing them needs to take all those livelihoods into account, and would be nearly impossible without going full on socialist (which I am completely for, I don't think it's feasible to continue a capitalist system when it is clearly breaking down and killing the planet while doing so.)
Flood insurance is nationally subsidized. People use it to afford their marina properties in Washington state.
Welcome to climate change. This is just the tip of the iceberg: things are just going to continue getting worse and worse each and every year.
Anyone that rebuilds in place after their whole house is destroyed is nuts.. if you get insurance payout.. this is your chance to move.
And we should demand that insurers stop paying for shit that we could predict. They should fill Florida with recyclable stuff as a big landfill and with rocks, then just drop a few invasive tree species, elephants, lions etc and put a big fence around the place. Then each year we would only need to rescue animals and not people. Rescuing animals is far more inconsequential. Nobody cares if the animals are homeless, but everyone hates homeless people.
Insurers have this in their pricing. Which is why you see some withdrawing completely, some offer stripped insurance that won't cover this and the ones that will still offer hurricane coverage will do so at prices that will cover their exposure.. and that will be prohibitively expensive for most.
I think we want the opposite of that. We want insurers to definitely pay out if they sold policies. We don't want them to collect premiums and then find shady ways to deny payment. If they decide to leave the market entirely, good for them, but as long as they're selling, we should insist that they pony up the payments.
Insurance companies save money by denying claims on a normal day. Paying to rebuild an entire state would jeopardize the big number going up and thus executive bonuses.
They won't be paying claims. They're not going to pay to rebuild a house that their models say will be knocked down again in 2-3 years by the next "storm of the century." Insurance companies exist to extract wealth, not to help people. And they will always have more lawyers than you.
They also have all kinds of weasel options in their coverage. "Sorry, you were covered for wind, not flood" They'll avoid paying any way they can.
But do they have more lawyers than the banks? Most of those houses are actually the bank's houses.
Insurance companies in the US have become a Ponzai scam instead of a service.
If your insurance only covers 50% of the property value it is essentially useless.
This is absolutely insane.
Wait until you hear about the deductible... where I am (not earthquake country by any means) the deductible was $80k. I sad pass on that.
My in-laws learned this the hard way after a total loss fire. Their insurance covered the current value of the house, not the cost to move/replace it in a total loss scenario, so now they have a big mortgage for their new house when the old one was nearly entirely paid off
50% of a seven-figure number is still at least a six-figure number. Very useful, definitely not essentially useless. If you disagree, please give me six figures, which you apparently don't need, so I can test the theory.
Yeah I'm sure every home destroyed was worth over a million. That's just a straw man.
My home insurance in the UK covers the full cost of tearing down and rebuilding if the house is damaged beyond repair. As it bloody should.
I’m perfectly fine letting Florida handle Florida’s problems.
Someone should point out to most of the right wingers that FEMA is socialism
Dont worry they voted unanimously to not expand fema right before both hurricanes.
It’s only socialism when the libs get it. Otherwise it’s their god given right.
They are already hunting FEMA folks.
Yup. Let the states decide, then pay for it
Yeah, but then we get Desantis as president in 2032....
Not a chance.
Also, we will be lucky if there is even an election in 2032.
Are we definitely skipping the 2028 election, then?
Insurance companies: "Wait you actually expect us to provide the service you're paying us for? That's not how this works!"
I feel bad for the Tampa homeowner who discovered homes in their neighborhood used to be worth seven figures and are now worth low six figures.
I think we all predicted that kind of thing would happen somewhere someday, and Florida is one of those top places on the list, but even so, we should be sympathetic. You never really think this kind of thing is going to happen to you, after all. Best of luck to everyone whose homes were destroyed.
I don’t. They dropped everything and moved across the country to a place with a known problematic housing market then gave the shocked picachu face when they couldn’t get back out. Remember that they dropped $550k cash. They are going to recover.
Someone who can afford a seven figure house is part of the 1% I'm not going to feel sorry about them losing a portion of their wealth that still keeps them above 95% of people.
Uhhhh.
https://www.google.com/search?q=what+percentage+of+homes+are+over+%241+million
Apparently per Redfin 8.5% of homes in the US are 7 figures or more. We're not talking the 1% here.
In California the median home price is almost $800,000.
I'm in a HCOL area in Washington State and regularly see 3bdrm and sometimes 2bdrm condos for over 1 million.
Not to mention sure your home is equity or net worth but most people only buy one and sell it anytime they move. Many of these people also planned on selling it / downsizing in retirement and converting it towards their retirement fund.
Remember that "afford" doesn't mean they have a million dollars. "afford" means they saved up a down-payment and then paid interest and mortgage payments (sometimes barely scraping by) for at least 30 years. Usually many more years if they moved from smaller house or a condo to a larger house when they decided to have a family (thereby starting a new mortgage for another 30 years). Or worst case, they haven't paid it off and now are underwater on their mortgage.
The banks are the ones making crazy money on all this.
Who could have seen this coming?
If only climate scientists had warned us 50 years ago we probably could have done something.
They have been warning us about the effects of CO2 in the atmosphere since 1896, then the people who produce the most CO2 bought the media and kept it quiet and gaslit.
If only we listened to Svante Arrhenius and acted then, we could have had a chance.
The insurance companies saw this coming. That's why they have the clauses that exclude flood damage.
every client of the companies affected with see that cost
well yes, that's how insurance works
Florida did this to themselves by deregulating parts of the insurance industry and making denials easier so that insurance companies would keep insuring places that are most likely to suffer from the effects of global warming and are in high-risk locations that people refuse to leave from.
Turns out Florida basically said "here, we'll make it so you can keep taking people's insurance payments and give them the illusion of homeowners insurance, but we will make it so you can easily and regularly deny any actual claims."
Classic Florida! 🤣