umbrella insurance: recommendations and thoughts on amica insurance

[endervalentine]

We're looking into getting an umbrella insurance to cover our primary house, rental and our two cars. From what I understand, you can reduce some of the coverage on the rental and the autos and have the umbrella cover it? For a $1mil coverage it's only $200/yr or so, sounds pretty inexpensive for what it's covering?

Google-fu says Amica is pretty popular insurance co for auto, but wanted to see what other people thought.

Any recommendations on what other companies we should look at?

 

[waffleironhead]

In my experience we actually had to increase our coverages on some of our insurance to qualify for the umbrella policy.(state farm) The insurance companies are no dummies. You cant just get bottom end liability insurance on you car and them 1 mil of umbrella.
I'd be curious to see how this works out for you though.

 

[sactoking]

Every umbrella policy is going to have underlying minimum coverages. For example, one company may state that you have to carry at least 100/300/100 on your car before you can be covered by the umbrella. If you fail to carry those minimums then your policy can be canceled. Many people who need an umbrella might have had more than the minimum coverages before they bought the umbrella. By purchasing the umbrella they can reduce the underlying coverages to the minimums.

For example, let's say you have 250/500/250 coverage on your car and that's the most your insurer offers. You have some assets and determine that you need more coverage. You find an insurer who offers a $1,000,000 umbrella with underlying minimums of 100/300/100. By purchasing the umbrella you can lower your underlying policy to the minimum and still have $1,300,000 of coverage. You might save money if you don't need more than $1,300,000 because the umbrella only kicks in when the underlying policy is expended and most claims don't go over 100/300 (which is why premium banding works).

There are lots of other benefits to an umbrella, too many to list here.

Any company with a good AM Best financial stability rating (A- or better) will be fine. You can go with your current insurer for ease or another insurer if you find a better rate or underlying minimum.

 

[spidey07]

sactoking has it covered. I was able to lower my coverage on the cars when I got the umbrella. For the price of an umbrella everybody should have one if you have any assets you don't want to lose.

 

[JEDI]

We're looking into getting an umbrella insurance to cover our primary house, rental and our two cars. From what I understand, you can reduce some of the coverage on the rental and the autos and have the umbrella cover it? For a $1mil coverage it's only $200/yr or so, sounds pretty inexpensive for what it's covering?

Google-fu says Amica is pretty popular insurance co for auto, but wanted to see what other people thought.

Any recommendations on what other companies we should look at?

yup, umbreela insurance is cheap lawyer insurance.

most of the time the insurance company will defend u in court, and their lawyers fees will be charged to the $1M umbrella.

MOST OF THE TIME....
sometimes the insurance company will just write a $1M check, put it into escrow acct, and walk away.

now you gotta spend $ to hire a lawyer. and the people sueing you are even more determined since they see all that $ in the escrow. think hungry rabid dogs.
u are fvcked if this happens...

 

[sactoking]

yup, umbreela insurance is cheap lawyer insurance.

most of the time the insurance company will defend u in court, and their lawyers fees will be charged to the $1M umbrella.

MOST OF THE TIME....
sometimes the insurance company will just write a $1M check, put it into escrow acct, and walk away.

now you gotta spend $ to hire a lawyer. and the people sueing you are even more determined since they see all that $ in the escrow. think hungry rabid dogs...

Attorney fees are not part of the limit of liability; on personal insurance policies there is no limit to the attorney fee benefit. Insurers have tried to just pay the limit of liability and walk away, saving the attorney fees, but case law in most every jurisdiction prevents that from happening. Not only do they have a contractual duty to defend until a verdict for damages is made but failure to do so opens them up to first party bad faith claims handling practices. The penalties for first party bad faith are MUCH greater than the cost of an attorney: think hundreds of thousands of dollars for a market conduct exams, then tens of thousands of dollars in regulatory penalties, then millions of dollars in breach of contract liability to the insured paid out at treble rates.

 

[dr150]

I won't answer the umbrella question, but I can answer the Amica question.

Time and again, Amica and USAA consistently come out tops as insurance companies (i.e. every customer service/financial metric survey) who will cover you and not give you an excuse like other companies....just see how the lot of other insurance companies behaved when it came to compensating clients during Hurricane Katrina. Shameless!!

Usually you'll get great prices with Amica and USAA, but if it came to paying some more money, at least I have much more confidence that they'll do the "stand up" thing when I need them.....and not risk that another "cheap" insurance company fucked me over after all those years of paying premiums!