Homeowners Insurance For Florida

Homeowners Insurance For Florida

In case you are with Florida's state run insurance carrier, your home insurance rates 're going up by as much as 10% this year. If you have your Florida property insurance with a private company, you will end up facing rate increases from 10-15%. However, if Florida insurance providers have their way, you may be losing significant discounts that may dramatically increase the expense of your homeowners insurance.

Presently, Florida homeowners enjoy what is known a wind mitigation discount for assorted home features that will make your home more resistant against hurricanes. Home insurance companies are required to give you this discount under Florida law plus a specific formula should 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 methods used to attach houses roof to the walls of your house, and whether or not your home has hurricane shutters and 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 had been showcased in the St. Petersburg Times invested $5,225 to strengthen 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 provide him a discount of $16.11! Other homeowners in Florida have saved far more.

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

At this time with the approach with the 2010 Florida legislative session, home insurance companies are asking legislatures to cut back some of those discounts. In some areas the companies could have a point. For starters, there does appear to be a certain amount of fraud connected with those discounts. This fraud can be the result of homeowners misrepresentations as well as due to errors inside the findings from the home inspection. In any case it could lead to homes being granted discounts they're not entitled to. Companies also point out that the doubling of these discounts in 2006 was much more of a political reaction to high rates when compared to a scientific process to price the discount based on the real way a property would perform within a hurricane.

Some companies are ordering and spending money on new mitigation inspections to obtain a more accurate picture of the home hardening mitigation steps that have been performed on your home. If a re-inspection on your home produces discrepancies, you might lose some of your discounts and face a massive 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 the worst recessions during our lifetimes. For a few Florida homeowners having these mitigation discounts modified or eliminated could cause thousands of dollars in additional premium costs.

This can be a critical development that most Florida homeowners ought to be following. Even slight changes towards the mitigation discounts might lead to massive increases in Florida property insurance premiums that will make the speed increases already approved look like small change!