Do You Have Insurance Protection If Your Dog Bites Someone?

I find it rather ironic that yesterday, in the middle of National Dog Bite Prevention Week, I was attacked by three large dogs near the end of a long bike ride.  Fortunately for me, I found a strong gear and a lot of adrenaline and managed to outrun the growling attackers before they could get their greedy fangs in me.  When I was safely away, I was shaking with fear.  Once I settled down a bit the fear was replaced by anger.  I have no doubt that if I had been bitten that my anger would have spilled over into a legal claim against the dog owners who allowed their animals to roam the road, threatening those who used it. 

The number of dog bite claims and the costs of those claims are on the rise all across the country.  The number of claims filed jumped 16% in 2011 over 2010, following an increase of 48% since 2003.  The Insurance Information Institute says that in 2011 dog bite claims totaled $479 million in the US with a total of 16,292 claims filed.  That’s nearly half a billion dollars!  Wow!  Of course we love to joke about dogs and mailman but the reality is bad and getting worse.  The Postal Service reports that nationwide there were more than 5500 postal workers attacked in 1400 cities in 2011.  These attacks cost the US Postal Service close to $1.2 million last year.  For a government agency that is already losing money, this must be truly frustrating.  And do you know the last thing most postal workers hear just before they are attacked by a dog?  The answer:  don’t worry my dog won’t bite. 

In response to the rising number of claims, the Postal Service has published a list of the top 25 cities in the US for dog bite claims.   At the top of the list is Los Angeles, followed by San Diego.  North Carolina only has one city on that list, Charlotte, which came in at number 24, tied with Orlando. 

With high levels of medical inflation piling up year after year, the cost of paying for your dog’s attack on someone else has skyrocketed over the past few years.  So how will you pay the bills if your dog bites someone?  Well, if you have purchased a standard NC homeowners policy, or even a renter’s insurance policy, then you will have protection under the liability section of your policy.  Your medical payments coverage, also a part of your NC homeowners insurance policy will also be available to pay the medical costs from the bite until the limit of coverage is exhausted.  Right now, though, the NC homeowners insurance market is in such a financial mess, that you will probably want to make the effort to avoid the claim in the first place.  More than likely, filing a large dog bite claim will result in the nonrenewal of your policy or at the very least, risk a huge rate increase for you at the next renewal.   You may also face pressure to euthanize your family pet.

So what can you do to help prevent a dog bite claim caused by one of your much loved pets?  Start with the understanding that any dog has the potential to bite someone.  You don’t want to be one more person telling your mailman that your dog doesn’t bite, just before an attack happens.  Instead, you should spend time socializing your dog so that it understands how to act with other people and other dogs.  You will have more success if you start this process when your dog is young.  Always discourage children from disturbing a dog that is eating or sleeping.   Don’t expose your dog to new situations if you are unsure of your dog’s response to that situation.  Never approach a strange dog and always avoid eye contact with a dog that appears threatening.

At Clinard Insurance Group, we want all insurance consumers to be informed buyers.   We insure thousands of families and businesses all across North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia.   If you would like personal, one on one help with any of your insurance needs, from home and auto insurance to life insurance or business insurance, please call us, toll free at 877-687-7557.

Car Dealers Insurance – What If You Knew When A Hail Storm Was Going To Hit Your Lot?

With over 300 different car dealers insured with us, we see a lot of hail damage claims.  Many of these storms can quickly generate thousands of dollars in damage in mere minutes.   What if you had a warning that would give you the time that you need to get your most valuable cars out of harm’s way before a hailstorm hits your lot?  How much money would that save you in deductible costs, and how much headache and time would you save in repair efforts?  Now there is a way to know exactly when your inventory is at risk as well as a way to know when the more general warnings on the radio and television don’t actually apply to your dealership.

AccuWeather has developed a new service that they call SkyGuard.  Skyguard puts meteorologists at work evaluating the weather risks for your lot’s specific longitude and latitude.  They will inform you if your inventory is at risk and give you the time you need to move your highest valued inventory into a safe location.  In addition, you will also know when a more general warning really won’t affect your specific location so you can rest easy when you see the weather warning scrolling across your television set.  These warning notifications can be sent to you by both text and email and SkyGuard will follow up with you until they receive a receipt that you received the message.

Skyguard aims for a minimum notice of 30 minutes for hail storms.  They can also warn you of tornadoes, lightning, rainfall, flash flooding, snow, high winds or ice if any of these pose a risk to your business.   They can customize your warning criteria so that you can choose exactly the information that you need to know.

Of course all the warnings in the world aren’t going to be much help to you if you don’t have a safe place to park your most valuable inventory before the storm arrives.  But if you do have some expensive inventory items and a safe place where you could park them in the event of a storm, then you might want to consider this service for your used car dealership.   As of this time I am not aware of a dealers insurance policy that provides any premium reduction for dealers who purchase this service, but I feel that eventually this kind of warning service will be subsidized in some way by your insurance company.  When that time comes, I will certainly blog about it to let you know.

While we are discussing hail damage to dealer inventory, it is a good to remind you that if you carry co comprehensive coverage on your inventory, then you will more than likely face a pretty large deductible in the event of a hail storm that hits your lot.  The reason for this is that most comprehensive deductibles on dealers insurance policies are structured so that you have a per vehicle deductible that usually caps out at 5 vehicles.   This can creep up to a large number in the event of widespread damage to your inventory.   Most of our dealers insurance policies are different though and have only a per loss deductible.    An example might help you see why this matters so much.  Assume that you have a $500 comprehensive deductible with a 5 car limit on that deductible on your policy.  After your lot is hit by hail, you will have to pay a $500 deductible on the first five cars that were damaged for a total of $2500.  If you had instead chosen a per loss deductible, then you would only be paying for the first $500 of damage in this same loss scenario.

Clinard Insurance Group, located in Winston Salem, NC, is very active in dealers insurance.  Currently we insure more than 300 used car dealerships all across North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia.  We want all used car dealers to be informed consumers when it comes to buying insurance for their dealership.  If you would like help with your dealers insurance, please visit us on the web at www.TheAutoDealersHelper.com or call us, toll free, at 877-687-7557.

Workers Compensation Insurance Mod Is Changing – Is This Good For You Or Bad For You?

Beginning in 2013, the National Council on Compensation Insurance is changing the formula used to calculate your business’ workers compensation insurance experience modification factor, called your experience mod, or just mod for short.  The results of these changes across all industries is designed to be revenue neutral overall, but taken one business entity at a time, this change will either be a win or a loss for you and your work comp insurance premiums.

So what is the change?  The formula is complicated and involves two parts, one designed to measure your actual primary loss costs against the expected loss costs for a business of your type and size and one to measure the excess losses against expected excess losses.  By far, the most impactful section of this formula is the section calculating your primary loss ratio.  As of today, this side of the formula only considers the first $5000 of each loss.  The remaining amount over $5000 is shifted to the excess loss side of the equation which has a much lower impact on the size of your mod.  The cut off for how much of a claim is considered in the primary loss cost is called the split point and has been set at $5000 for over 20 years.  Beginning with mod calculations in 2013, this split point is going to be increased steadily each year from $10,000 in 2013, to $13,500 in 2014 and on to $15,000 in 2014.  After that, the split point will be adjusted for inflation on a yearly basis.

So how do you calculate if this mod formula change is a winner or a loser for you and your business?  First you need to understand that for the 2013 mod calculation, the NCCI will be looking at your claims for the 2009, 2010, and 2011 policy years.  This is because the NCCI wants to give each claim enough time to settle and that leaves a big lag time in how a claim impacts your premiums.    Take a look at your loss history during those policy years and determine how many of those claims paid out more than $5000 for losses occurring during that time.  If all of your losses have a total payout of less than $5000, then you will likely see your experience mod factor fall to a lower number.  If, however, some of those losses exceeded $5000, then you will likely see an increase in your mod next year.

If your mod goes up, that can have two direct impacts on the amount of money you pay for workers compensation insurance.  The first impact is clear, your modification factor is a multiplier on your policy that increases or decreases your total premium to reflect the kind of loss experience you have had.  When your mod goes up, then so does your workers compensation costs.  But there is a more subtle effect as well.  Many workers compensation insurance companies use the mod factor as a quick way to decide which companies qualify for their best rates, and which need to go into their high risk programs which carry much higher underlying rates.  So an increasing mod may mean that you will have a harder time finding the low base rates for your policy that you may now be used to paying.

Going forward the winners in this new mod change process will be those companies that are able to keep their loss costs lower.  Since by 2015, every dollar of loss costs under $15,000 per loss will flow to the primary losses side of the equation, the part of the formula that can do you the most damage, then it is in your best interest to keep the overall costs of any accident as low as possible.  One of the best ways to do this is to choose a specialized workers compensation insurance company, one that writes only workers compensation insurance.  These companies generally have much stronger loss prevention programs that they can help you implement to keep losses from happening in the first place.  They also tend to have stronger programs to reduce medical fraud and employee fraud as well as programs to get your employee back to work sooner.   All of these techniques have been proven to reduce overall loss costs and now that means a lot more to you than it used to mean.

At Clinard Insurance Group, we help hundreds of small businesses all across North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee with their workers compensation insurance needs.  We can help you evaluate the impact of these mod changes to you and help you find an insurance carrier that can help you keep your future loss costs lower and thus save you money not just today but year after year in the future as well.  If you would like our help with your workers compensation insurance, please call us, toll free, at 877-687-7557.

Has Your Situation Changed Since You Last Considered A Personal Umbrella Insurance Policy?

One of the most underutilized and least expensive policies designed for families is the personal umbrella insurance policy.  This happens because most insurance buyers are usually more focused on reducing premiums than they are on buying asset protection.  Also, many insurance agents just don’t make this an important part of their coverage discussion when talking with their personal insurance clients.   And even if you don’t feel that you need this policy today, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t revisit the idea from time to time.  The truth is that over time, most families will be in or pass through a time where a personal umbrella insurance policy makes a lot of sense for them.

Let’s take a quick look at what a personal umbrella policy is designed to do for you. These policies are designed to increase the protection that you already have on your homeowners insurance policy and your auto insurance policy. They can also add a layer of liability protection to other policies you might have like boat insurance, motorcycle insurance or RV insurance.     Usually they start with a minimum liability limit of $1,000,000 but you can usually purchase limits on up to $5 million or more if you need it.

Where you live can have a lot to do with your risk factors.  Anyone living near metropolitan areas or areas where there are more wealthy people are at greater risk of being the target of a lawsuit.  To make matters worse, the poor economic environment of the recent past has also increased the number of people who are willing to sue you if the opportunity presents itself.  If you cause an accident and injure someone who has recently lost his or her job, or who may feel that his or her job is not secure, then you are now dealing with someone who has good reason to hire an attorney to try and get as much as they can from you while they have a chance.

The need for a personal umbrella policy also changes for most families over time.  This is due to a gradual increase in asset exposure over time as well as the sometimes temporary but very real changes in risk exposure.   Let’s look at these two phenomenon one at a time.

Asset exposure simply refers to the increase in value of your assets over time that give you something to loose and that make you a richer target for litigation.   Most kids out of college have very few assets to lose.  This is often a time in life when they select their auto insurance and perhaps even home insurance agent.  They may reject the notion of an umbrella policy then because they really don’t have much to lose.  But over time as they aquire retirement accounts, pay down the house mortgage and build up savings, these same people now have a different asset exposure.  If they don’t make a change to their insurance portfolio and purchase an umbrella policy, then they risk losing it all to one bad accident.   Buying an umbrella policy for a few hundred dollars a year would be a much better choice for them than leaving all of their hard earned assets at risk to the greed of an injury attorney and his client.

Increased risk exposure can also slip into a family’s life literally overnight.  The best example of this is the day your teenager gets his or her license.  Now you have a driver with very little experience out on the roads,  driving a car titled in your name and all of your assets are now on the line if they make a mistake.  Imagine your 16 year old reading a text while hurtling down the highway at 70 miles per hour.  This little scenario could really change your financial situation for the rest of your life if you haven’t prepared for it with an umbrella policy.  The day my oldest child turned sixteen, I doubled the amount of coverage  on my personal umbrella policy.

At Clinard Insurance Group we want all insurance buyers to be informed consumers.   We insure thousands of families all across North Carolina, helping them keep their assets safe.   If your personal insurance portfolio does not include a personal umbrella policy, then please call our office today at 877-687-7557.  We will be happy to help you analyze your needs and help you find the umbrella policy that leaves you with a feeling of comfort about the safety of your hard earned assets.