My D crashed her car so we are on the look out for a newer vehicle. I called Geico who has our auto insurance to get info about a few cars we might be looking at. When that conversation was over, the agent said they could pass me off to the homeowners section for a home insurance quote.
We currently have USAA and while I’m not unsatisfied with them, I’m not too happy either. Our rates have almost doubled in the last 3 years even though we have not made a claim. When I asked USAA why this was happening, they stated the hurricanes around our state (Virginia). ??
Anyway, Geico gave me a homeowners quote that was about $600 less than USAA and to make sure I was comparing apples to apples, I had our current policy open. The quote is for Homesite Insurance. Has anyone ever heard of this group or used them when it was important? Costing less than USAA is not necessarily a good thing, I want to make sure if we HAD to use our insurance, we can without too much hassle.
I don’t know about Homesite, and you’ve probably heard me say this before, but have you checked out Armed Forces Insurance (AFI)? Half the price of USAA, they don’t mess with you, they pay out easily, and don’t rsise your rates. Very straightforward. So happy to dump USAA. The icing on the cake was the subscribers saving account check USAA has to give you after you ditch them. Over 3K after being with them over 20 years.
Progressive (our auto insurer) also works with them for home/renters insurance policies. We’re using them for son’s renters insurance. His apartment was burglarized over winter break. We’re still in the midst of our claim, so I can’t speak for how well it will work out in the end, but so far I haven’t been impressed. It’s definitely not the level of customer service that I’m used to from either Progressive when making auto claims or my own local home insurance company. They just make it seem like our claim is a hassle for them to deal with.
When USAA massively jacked up our homeowners insurance rate, saying our home cost over 700k more to rebuild it than when we bought it five years earlier (which was 100% BS), I had this young woman in Texas adamantly saying how much construction costs had gone up in my area. My contractor friend said no, they had probably gone down. It was insulting, and I’ve talked to others who said they’d been reevaluating the pricier properties to see if they could raise the rates somehow. They reevaluated our basement space to over $320 per square foot. For low cost, low value, generic basement footage.
We have insurers who are local, whom our independent insurance agent has had good experiences getting claims paid from. I’m not sure whether they are the lowest rates (tho I feel they are reasonable), but I’m thrilled she’s had positive experiences with them promptly and properly paying claims. This is why I have insurance. I trust her to keep us with insurers who will pay claims promptly.
@busdriver11 - thanks for the reminder about Armed Forces Insurance (AFI). I’ll give them a call. I’m also going to ask Geico if they have any other companies that do the underwriting. I feel that homeowners insurance is one of those things that you don’t want to get the ‘best’ deal- it’s more about who will pay out when you need them, with as little hassle as possible.
True,ChuckleDoodle. Fortunately Armed Forces has done right by us every time, and we always ended up with cash in our pocket. They are like USAA used to be, straightforward, no games, and a good deal. I got weary of USAA messing with us.