Homeowners Insurance For Florida

Florida Long term care Insurance

In case you are with Florida's state run insurance provider, your home insurance rates are going up by approximately 10% this year. If you have your Florida home insurance with a private company, you will be facing rate increases from 10-15%. However, if Florida insurance firms have their way, you may be losing significant discounts that could dramatically increase the price of your homeowners insurance.

Presently, Florida homeowners enjoy what is known as a wind mitigation discount for assorted home features that will make your home more resistant against hurricanes. Home insurance companies must give you this discount under Florida law along with a specific formula must be used to calculate it. It offers discounts for things like the design of your roof, whether your roof has a secondary backup system for removing water, the techniques used to attach your roof to the walls of your home, and whether or not your house has hurricane shutters among others.

Home insurance consumers in Florida have enjoyed these discounts which can be up to 50% of the wind premium over a home. However, homeowners sometimes are disappointed with those discounts too. One homeowner who was simply showcased in the St. Petersburg Times invested $5,225 to boost the garage door as well as for hurricane shutters on his home in Spring Hill, Florida. He was very upset to find out that his $5,225 investment would only supply him with a discount of $16.11! Other homeowners in Florida have saved a lot more.

Started in 2002 along with improvements to the Florida building code, these wind mitigation discounts were an essential step in the process to deliver lower Florida property insurance rates to those with homes more unlikely to sustain serious damage in a Florida hurricane. Those discounts were doubled through the state of Florida in 2006 in order to provide some rate relief following your 2004/2005 hurricane season.

At the moment with the approach of the 2010 Florida legislative session, property insurance companies are asking legislatures to reduce some of those discounts. In some areas the companies might have a point. For starters, there does appear to be a certain amount of fraud connected with those discounts. This fraud could possibly be the result of homeowners misrepresentations and also due to errors inside the findings from the home inspection. The point is it could lead to homes being granted discounts they aren't entitled to. Companies also explain that the doubling of the discounts in 2006 was much more of a political a reaction to high rates than the usual scientific process to correctly price the discount based on the real way a home would perform throughout a hurricane.

Some companies are ordering and investing in new mitigation inspections to acquire a more accurate picture of the property hardening mitigation steps which have been performed on your home. In case a re-inspection on your home produces discrepancies, you might lose some of your discounts and face an enormous increase in your Florida property insurance premiums.

From your perspective being a homeowner, rolling back these discounts would add significantly towards the cost of your Florida home insurance. And this would happen during one of many worst recessions during our lifetimes. For some Florida homeowners having these mitigation discounts modified or eliminated you could end up thousands of dollars in additional premium costs.

This can be a critical development that Florida homeowners needs to be following. Even slight changes for the mitigation discounts might cause massive increases in Florida property insurance premiums that will make the pace increases already approved look like small change!