Earthquake Insurance

I just got one of those letters from the California Earthquake Authority offering an earthquake insurance policy. Seems we get one of these letters once or twice a year. I generally don't bother reading them.

We used to have earthquake insurance. I recall it not being too expensive. This was probably over 20 years ago but the figure $125.00 comes to mind. Don't remember if that was per year or twice a year. It couldn't have been once a month. That would be expensive. We ended up dropping it after a while mostly because, inexpensive though it was, we just didn't have the money at one point.

We actually made a claim back during one of the earthquakes in the early '90s that messed up the house a bit, including me having to take down our chimney. Insurance adjuster gal came out and really gave the place the once over. She told us when she got here it would be at least two hours so we just went to work and let her have at it. 

She found damage we weren't even aware of but, after all was said and done, her estimate came to just under $6000.00, which was our deductible. We didn't think about it before we called her but we didn't even have the $6k to pay the deductible. A life experience, I suppose, but otherwise a waste of time having her come out to begin with.

That might have been another reason we dropped the insurance: You're still gonna have to come up with the deductible. It could be argued that it makes more sense to save the $125 premium since you're still going to have to borrow money to rebuild or fix the house anyway.

This offer I got in the mail yesterday is the same kind of thing, except the deductible is listed as $37,155.00. Wow! No doubt we'd have to borrow all that money to begin with. On the upside, the amount of coverage to the house is more in line with the value of our house- $247,000- than our fire insurance. We're under-insured for fire right now.

I'm not sure what the premium would be. It says $677.00 for a multi- story house on a raised foundation, but again I'm not sure if that means once or twice a year. Once a year isn't that bad as that would be a bit over $50 a month, but if you just made a payment once a year it would be a bit tough.

Still, with the high deductible, we'd have to borrow the money just to get started. At our age, we might as well just borrow the whole amount to repair the house rather than just the deductible. We probably won't live long enough to pay it off anyway.

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Speaking of earthquakes, I probably mentioned this before but will again for newer readers: That earthquake that had us make the claim also pulled the two story part of our house a little bit away from the single story. We noticed that early on. 

While I wasn't concerned about the house collapsing, I took advantage of an offer the city made to have building inspectors come out and inspect your house for free. What the heck, said I, no harm in having someone in the know take a look.

I wasn't quite right. The guy came out and told me I needed a [free] permit to take down the chimney. Then he put a green placard on the front door signifying the house was safe to be in. That's when I realized I might have made a mistake calling him. If he deemed the house dangerous for occupancy, he could have red tagged it and we could have had the city trying to evict us from our house.

I don't know that I'll ever call them out again. If our house is unsafe to be in, I'd like to be the judge of that, not the city.