The Top Reasons Why Your Homeowner’s Insurance Claim Could Be Denied

December 6, 2013

They paid us

 

(The following is a paid post from HBF Health. If you live in Western Australia, please patronise them. If you don’t, please move there and then buy a policy.)

Every homeowner needs to have homeowner’s insurance in order to protect their home and property in case a disaster was to occur, to replace any damaged or stolen property and to cover their personal liability. Homeowner’s insurance, though, doesn’t come without its own limitations.

If you are preparing to file a claim and are worried that it might be denied or if you made an insurance claim that was denied, you want to review your contract thoroughly to see why it may be denied or was denied. Here are some of the top reasons why a homeowner’s insurance claim could be denied.

Unpaid Premiums

If you did not pay your premiums or are currently late on paying your premium, your insurance claim will very likely be denied. If your claim was denied for this reason, you might be able to raise an appeal to try to overturn the denied claim, but it is obviously better to avoid this scenario by always paying your premiums on time. You can find out more about specific coverage at the HBF home insurance site, visit today to see how it can benefit you.

Lies on Your Application

Whenever you file a claim, your homeowner’s insurance company will check your application against all investigation results and documentation coming in regarding your claim. If the company notices that you lied, exaggerated or otherwise provided false information, your claim will be denied. You also will have your insurance policy revoked and be at risk for being sued by the company if they made any previous payouts to you.

The Exclusion Clause

In each homeowner’s insurance policy, there is an exclusion clause that dictates what the insurance company will not cover. Some of the most common exclusions to homeowner’s insurance are flood and earthquake damage, which are available as add-ons to your primary homeowner’s insurance policy that cost extra.

Negligent Claims

If you could be found negligent, your homeowner’s insurance claim could easily be denied. For example, if your house was damaged by a disaster when repairs your house needed could have been made preventing the damage, then the insurance company could deny your claim. Any negligent conditions that could have prevented the damage if the condition was fixed could cause your claim to be denied.

Allotted Coverage is Exceeded

There are limits of liability that your homeowner’s insurance policy provides you with. This means that your possessions you have in your house are insured only up to a certain amount. So, you are only allowed to claim the amount up to that which is covered under your policy. If you are in need of greater coverage for your possessions, you have to get an insurance rider in order to increase your coverage.

Too Many Claims

One of the most common reasons homeowner’s insurance claims get denied is too many claims being filed within a short time span. Insurance companies expect that losses are not supposed to happen often, if at all, as they will lose money if they have to pay out for too many claims too frequently.

If you’ve already made several claims, the chances of your claim being denied are much greater. To better the chances that every claim you make is covered, try not to file claims that you cannot pay for on your own, so you don’t get stuck struggling to pay for any major losses.

Filed Under: Insurance, Paid advertisement Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Money Is The Root Of All Evil

September 26, 2012

 

Indisputable moral evil, the result of the LACK of money.

If you really believe the headline, then we have a lot of deprogramming to put you through.

In and of itself, money is nothing. People who complain about money, or its absence in their lives, or its influence in the world at large, are missing the point. Money is an abstraction, a mechanism for keeping score. It’s a representation of tangible goods and services. As a society, we’ve decided to use money because it’s infinitely easier than bartering everything would be.

Marissa Meyer doesn’t have more money than you so much as her capitalizing on her particular combination of talents, background, luck and other attributes have enabled her to amass more stuff than you. That’s a distinction and a difference. The stuff, exchangeable for other stuff (and that exchangeability is one definition of money), builds upon itself and allows its owner to propagate and maintain a lifestyle. If you earmark a chunk of that stuff for investing – i.e., allow other people to use the representation of your stuff, in the hopes of generating still more stuff, to be distributed among all the parties involved in the investment transaction – and you get a sufficient return, you can keep doing this indefinitely and free yourself from the hassle of going into an office or on a jobsite every day. Correspondingly, you can then spend your time on other pursuits that transcend commuting, pleasing your boss, sitting through racial sensitivity workshops and many of the other banalities of modern life in a developed society.

In case it isn’t obvious, we’re generalizing here, well past the parameters of that amorphous topic called “personal finance”. It’s about self-actualization, which is more than just a term used in a famous paper by some long-dead academic looking to earn credentials.

If you clicked on the link, you’ll notice that most people you know spend the majority of their lives on the 2nd level (from the bottom) of the pyramid.

This is how our Bronze Age antecedents lived. Or our subsistence farming brethren who dwell today on the steppes of Bashkortostan. Or pretty much every non-domesticated species of animal. We’re supposed to be beyond this. For 99% of human history, the most important task at hand has been ensuring you have a full belly. We don’t have to do this anymore. Go to your neighborhood supermarket, and for the price of a couple hours’ wages you can find enough protein, fats and carbohydrates to keep you alive for a few more days. No threshing, gathering, planting, sowing, digging, silage, nor sunup-to-sundown workdays required. Just a couple hours of your time, which you might very well have spent in an air-conditioned office, on an ergonomic chair.

For us at CYC, even that couple of hours is too much time. Which brings us to a fundamental truth about making money, something the poor and permanently struggling are too dumb to figure out:

The relationship between effort rendered and reward received is not linear.

You can complain about this, you can say it isn’t fair. You might as well complain about the weather. The line italicized above is the text of a natural law. (Hyrum W. Smith: “A natural law is one that cannot be repealed.”) If you work twice as hard as your neighbor, you probably won’t make twice as much money. The assembly-line employee who creates widgets at twice the speed of her less competent co-worker is an abstraction, too, and not a particularly elegant one. There’s a limit to how many widgets you can create, at least with your own hands, and thus a (modest) upper bound to how much stuff you can exchange your time as a widget-maker for.

So you have to leverage. For most people who are smart enough to sniff the 3rd level of the pyramid, this means going to college. The theory is that an additional 4 or more years of taking notes in various classrooms will enable you to increase the ratio at which you receive stuff in exchange for a fixed amount of time.

Ask this 30-year-old child how that’s working out for him.

Education is swell. Deferring real life while fooling yourself into thinking you’re doing something worthwhile is not. A computer science degree will guarantee you a profound change in your ability to convert your time into stuff. A women’s studies degree will not, and hopefully that goes without saying. The latter won’t help you convert your time into stuff any better than a high school diploma will. In fact, the diploma on its own will do a far better job, seeing as it didn’t directly cost its holder thousands of dollars to earn.

So you have to leverage beyond mere education. Which means borrowing money in anticipation of greater returns. The vast majority of wealth on the planet – the ever-growing mass of everything from furniture to office buildings to surfboards – is the result of some people borrowing from others to finance their desires. On the individual level it can mean going to the bank, and borrowing money that other people have deposited there, so you can buy a house. Which saves you from exchanging too many of your hours at work so you can rent a place to live, from a landlord who figured out this leverage thing a long time ago.

The balances in your 401(k) investments – mutual funds, etc. Technically most of that is equity and not debt, but you’re still forking over money to the managers of the funds’ components so they can make more stuff. Which is leverage, again. Leverage is supposed to be mutually beneficial, and it usually is.

But most of the benefits accrue to the person who’s initiating the leverage. The investor who finds a plot of land on which to build an industrial park that will eventually house some paying tenants, but needs some partners to chip in. The car salesman who figured out that financing cars pays better than selling them does. The tradesman who cashes out said 401(k), gladly paying the 10% penalty, so he can start his own contracting firm. The working stiff who decides that being an investor sounds more rewarding than waiting for a raise.

Sure, they might fail, at least initially. That’s not the point. The point is that the alternative – punching a clock as life ticks away – is the real risky behavior.

Filed Under: Capitalism Tagged With: , , ,

€V€RYBODY PANIC

April 6, 2012

 

Not that kind of euro. Alright, as long as we're making jokes, and this is probably the 3rd image we've run of a guy with a purse, what is the purpose behind this? What does a man ever need to carry beyond keys (one pocket), a wallet (another pocket), and a phone (third pocket)? With a standard 4-pocket pair of pants, that leaves one pocket free for lollipops to give to itinerant children.

 

Unless we’re stuck in a foreign airport, the vast majority of us don’t exchange currencies. But good Lord, do we hear about it. Will (European country) drop the euro? Will its value fall through the floor? Is the recent talk about the euro’s troubles just an indirect ploy to get us to buy gold? How does this affect the U.S. economy?

Nobody knows anything. Nor does anyone remember anything.

Financial journalists have to report every 1¢ swing in the value of the euro as of great significance. Each movement the markets make in a given day – even a given hour – is reported upon ad nauseam. Why? Honestly, the biggest reason is that there’s a 24-hour news cycle to fill. It’s human nature to overemphasize the importance of how we each choose to spend our time. If you don’t believe that, find a teacher and listen to her yammer about how important her job is. The same applies to everyone whose job it is to provide you with financial information. Something utterly unimportant – the euro losing a tiny bit of its value vis-a-vis the dollar – can inspire a 6-person roundtable discussion on CNBC.

That being said, some wags are already calling for the euro’s funeral dirge. Here’s why, kind of:

The euro entered the world on the first day of 1999, trading at $1.174. A year later, it fell to the point where it equaled the dollar for the first time. That fall the euro sank to its nadir, around 84¢. It again outvalued the dollar in July of 2002, briefly (and barely) dipped below again, and has been worth at least a dollar since that November. In July of 2008 it reached its zenith, trading at $1.58. Now it sits at around $1.32, and that alone gives many cause to question the euro’s future.

The euro is the national currency of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, Andorra, Montenegro, Kosovo, Vatican City, San Marino, Monaco, Slovenia, Slovakia, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Finland, Estonia, Cyprus and Austria.

Notice any European country missing?

Yes, Switzerland too. We were thinking of a nation slightly larger. Come on, you can do this. Bad food, no fluoride, used to have an Empire that the sun never set on?

Correct, the United Kingdom.

In 1990, back when the euro was not even a foul thought in its father’s head (a line stolen from Phil Hendrie for just such an occasion), Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was steadfast in her opposition to eventually dropping the pound sterling in favor of a transnational currency. Steadfast, and outnumbered. Her objections had nothing to do with convenience, national pride or exchangeability. They were much more pragmatic.

Thatcher argued, in print no less, that a modern and robust economy – we’ll call it Country A – and a basket case like Country B can’t share a currency. For one thing, a transnational currency would lower (and has lowered) interest rates. The weaker the replaced national currency, the greater the decrease in the interest rate. Which makes sense – a transnational replacement currency is necessarily weaker than the strong currencies it replaced and stronger than the weak ones it replaced. The interest rate is the price of money. The cheaper money is – i.e., the less it costs to borrow – the lower the interest rate. The countries that had weak currencies going in, such as Portugal and Italy, now found it easier to borrow money. And borrow they did.

Greece, too. Thatcher even mentioned Greece by name. It’s “Country B” above. Country A is Germany, Europe’s most powerful.

There are legitimate advantages to a weak currency; one weak when compared to others, that is (as contrasted with one weak when compared to itself historically.) For one thing, it makes exports cheaper. The U.S. dollar has lost around 10% of its value relative to the New Zealand dollar over the past year. American exporters who would never have been competitive enough to sell to Kiwis before have a brand new market/clientele. To a New Zealander, American goods are now that much cheaper. When a small country has the weak currency and larger countries have the comparatively strong ones, the effect on the small country’s potential for exports (and hence growth) is even greater. But the American dollar and the New Zealand dollar are necessarily different and unequal. It’s when two countries’ currencies should differ, but are prevented from doing so, that problems exacerbate.

Trouble arises when a small country (Greece) can now borrow more money than it did under its old currency, while sharing the new currency with stronger economies. When the euro become reality, it artificially made Greece’s currency more robust while doing the opposite to Germany’s. Greece could borrow more than before. And did. Boy, did it ever. Overextended itself, couldn’t pay its bills. So Germany, by virtue of being the local heavyweight, has to lend billions to Greece. If it doesn’t, Greece has incentive to quit the euro. A less-circulated euro means other weak countries would want to follow suit.

This is what the pound sterling has done with respect to the euro since the latter’s inception. The higher the graph, the stronger the pound. The Brits might be buying goods cheaply from the continent while having to sell them elsewhere, but at least they’re not worrying about their currency imploding.

One more thing. To use the euro, a country needs to qualify. (Several other countries are in line to adopt it as their currency: Latvia, Lithuania, and Denmark, among others.) Qualification means keeping inflation and long-term interest rates under particular thresholds, and the same for debt and deficit (relative to gross domestic product.)

Guess what? When all a government has to do to get access to cheap money is provide certain numbers to the European Central Bank, that government wants those numbers to look as good as possible. Honesty is at best a secondary goal here. The Greeks lied through their ouzo-scented teeth. The Portuguese, Italians and Spaniards weren’t all that forthright either. But now, it’s too late for the ECB to say, “No, you have to go back to your original currency.” Don’t think for a moment that something similar couldn’t happen in the United States, with a Department of the Treasury telling enough lies to keep the cheap money flowing. There’s no transnational currency for the U.S. to back out of, but there’s plenty of economic havoc to wreak.

It’s hard to appreciate how an artifice can create such damage, but it can. In a healthy system, currencies can trade against each other in the open market, correcting imbalances and reinforcing the economic soundness of each currency’s issuing government. When drachma and marken are operating as de jure equals, Greece eats itself into a coma. Which Germany then has to arouse.

“Adapt or die” is a truism throughout life. It’s hard to adapt when you’re forcefully prevented from doing so.

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