<p>H broke someone’s window while golfing w/D. She found it most amusing that the homeowner happened to be a police officer. Is it worth looking into our home insurance to pay for it? Will we get dinged for making a claim? The last time the guy’s window was broken, it cost $500 to replace.</p>
<p>I would just pay for it. We had a tree fell on us, one and only one time in 12 years, the claim was 750 and deductible was 500. They raised our rate the following year because we put in a claim (they told us).</p>
<p>Ask the company what their policy is on raising rates. Some will raise it for 2 claims in a 3 year period. Some have dropped coverage for that.</p>
<p>My advice is to pay the $500 and then raise your deductable to well over $500. It will save you more in the long run than making the claim.
And figure out how to avoid hitting the officer’s house next time!</p>
<p>Are golfers responsible for broken windows of houses on the golf course? We live on a golf course now, fortunately the tee is right behind our house so we don’t get hit, but neighbors down the fairway tell us their homes get hit by errant balls frequently. Given the location of some of the houses you have to expect to get hit by golf balls.</p>
<p>Nobody can tell you want the best thing to do without knowing the exact specifics of your insurance situation…</p>
<p>The only thing you can do is look at your current deductible, whether or not your rates would go up in the case of a claim, and what that rate increase would be… then try to do the math and figure out if you’d pay more in the long run just writing a check now or making a claim.</p>
<p>I would guess that in most cases you might be better off just paying the $500 and be done with it, but you’d really have to do the math to know for sure. </p>
<p>As previously mentioned, this would be a good time to look at your deductible. Most insurance agents try to sell you a really low deductible, but if you do the math this often costs a lot more in the long run. </p>
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In most cases, yes. The person who broke the window should generally pay for it… the golfer broke the window not the golf course.</p>
<p>This would be a liability claim because it happened at someone else’s property. I have made one such claim and did not have to pay a deductible, nor did my deductible or my rate go up. At the time, I called my dad to see if he could think of anything further to be done to minimize the damage and he told me to call my home owner’s insurance and that there’d be no deductible; he was right.</p>
<p>Looks like I’ll be making an “anonymous” call to my ins. agent. Thanks for the replies - we live on a golf course, too, and before we bought, my husband asked to look at the golf course plans (it hadn’t been built, yet) to make sure we were “safe”. Still, we find errant balls in our yard. One has to be REALLY bad to hit one directly into our yard!</p>
<p>I have called my agent and asked about making claims and didn’t feel it needed to be anonymous. They couldn’t give me an informed answer without knowing the policy history.</p>
<p>Just as a follow up: I called my ins agent today. He suggested that we get an estimate for the window first. If we filed a claim, we would lose our “claim free” discount for 5 years. He helped me do the math - if the replacement cost was around $500 (info from the homeowner), it we should pay. If ins paid, it would cost us $800 in lost discounts to make up for it. Learn something new everyday!</p>