You have to have insurance if you want a mortgage so not having insurance is basically just a proxy for (mostly old) people who own their house outright.
I would carry a $50k deductible if I could. No insurer I've encountered would let me. I don't really care to insure against anything other than a total loss.
I'm insured, but I'm considering dropping insurance for the most likely disaster: earthquakes.
I'm in CA, and even though I'm not on top of an active fault, I'm close enough to be impacted. When the big one gets here, if it's big enough to affect me, then everyone else will be affected. I don't have any reason to expect them to stay solvent if a third of the CA population files for benefits.
I've thought about taking the money I pay for earthquake insurance premiums, and instead putting it on polymarket, betting that an earthquake will happen. If it doesn't, then I'm no worse off than I was paying for insurance. If it does, then polymarket just distributes my "winnings".
The most convincing argument I could make is that the government could step in and keep the insurance agencies solvent. Sort of a too-big-to-fail situation.
If you own an older house then the economically rational choice is to drop your insurance and put that money into seismic retrofits instead. Better to prevent earthquake damage in the first place rather than hoping that insurance will cover repairs. There is even financial assistance available in some cases.
Insurers rely on reinsurance (insurance against their insurance) for precisely this reason. And if a disaster bad enough to take out a major insurer happens, it wouldn’t surprise me if the government stepped in.
It would be more useful to determine why insurance premiums are rising faster than almost every other homeowner expense. At the same time noting that insurance companies are making massive profits and squandering millions on executive salaries and advertising.
This article states that poor people cannot afford insurance. Is this a portal about insurance? Maybe they could help lower the cost for those in need?
This applies to us Europeans too, only that the most likely disaster is permanent unemployment, not a health issue. You americans have had practical full employment for decades.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 22.8 ms ] threadI wondered whether this is a signal that the insurers don't want to insure for those risks and unsurprisingly there is a Wikipedia page for it! [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_and_insurance_i...
I would carry a $50k deductible if I could. No insurer I've encountered would let me. I don't really care to insure against anything other than a total loss.
I'm in CA, and even though I'm not on top of an active fault, I'm close enough to be impacted. When the big one gets here, if it's big enough to affect me, then everyone else will be affected. I don't have any reason to expect them to stay solvent if a third of the CA population files for benefits.
I've thought about taking the money I pay for earthquake insurance premiums, and instead putting it on polymarket, betting that an earthquake will happen. If it doesn't, then I'm no worse off than I was paying for insurance. If it does, then polymarket just distributes my "winnings".
Convince me to keep my insurance.
https://www.crmp.org/
It's all compromises.