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Welcome back everyone to Ready Set Sold I’m your host Bryan Vogt and I’m so excited that we have an insurance specialist named Dan Myers and he’s from the Insurance Store and really happy to have them on here today because not only does he has over well after over five years with Princeton insurance but he also has a background in lending and financial services – so he’s a well-rounded insurance agent and one of the reasons why I wouldn’t have Dan on here was you really want to talk about coverages and people thinking that they got what they don’t have when it comes to insuring their biggest asset for most and that is their house Danny you there.
I’m here thanks for having me Bryan welcome to the show so Dan I guess you know give us some insight what are we talking about when we talk about coverages yeah that’s a great question and coverages can be something you know to somebody that’s not deep into the insurance world like I am that can be a challenging thing and insurance is one of those things that when you look at your policy information or declarations page and that’s the page that shows you all the numbers right that shows you all your coverage limits that says this is what you’re covered for sometimes that’s not the most important page the pages with the words are oftentimes the more important ages but that’s what none of us look at so when I talk about coverages I think it’s important to have some perspective on this.
So one of my driving passions about insurance which sounds weird to say because insurance is usually thought of to be somewhat boring and it probably is but one of my big drivers in my business and for my clients is that the Department of Insurance a couple of years ago did a study on basically on this on coverage and specifically with homeowners what they found was 67 percent six seven almost seventy percent of homeowners are considered to be underinsured.
And initially I read that I thought wow that’s kind of scary but what do they mean by underinsured right so I looked at underinsured and what their definition was is essentially said if the house burns down it flows away in a tornado if we have to completely rebuild a home the check that the insurance company is going to write to that homeowner isn’t going to be enough to cover that cost so to me that was kind of a scary thing as an insurance agent.
And I’m going oh no now I dug into that a little bit deeper and figured out what some of those problems were and was very happy to know that the recommendations that I had been giving to my clients have been much more accurate for a number of different reasons there’s been a lot of changes in insurance that have changed the way that insurance companies evaluate rebuild values so again this is a lot of in the weed stuff a lot of stuff that maybe touches on you know touches home for somebody maybe doesn’t so how can I help the average person look at a policy and say hey this should be enough coverage to rebuild my house right because that’s the important one and I think the best thing that I can do is say there’s two or three different primary values that we assign through a home in the real estate world right there’s a there’s your market value what somebody’s willing to pay for the house there’s the appraised value which is more or less the official opinion of value.
Obviously that’s what the lenders are going off of and then there’s the rebuild value now rebuild value is not connected to market values or any of this other stuff it is purely dollars and cents what does it cost labor charges debris removal all of the soft costs factored in to rebuild a house and what I can tell you is in the St. Louis metro area in rounding areas that number is the rebuild value is usually more than what you’re going to pay for the house.
And sometimes it’s fifty or hundred or more is usually the more expensive the home the bigger difference that’s going to be from the purchase price to the rebuild value so if those two numbers look very similar that’s cause for concern that would be the big thing that I can point out to you also I think deductibles it’s important to touch on that because there have been a lot of changes with deductibles and with a deductible a lot of companies have switched to a percentage based deductible and sometimes sounds really good.
But if you’ve got a $300,000 house and a 1% deductible your deductible is effective $3,000 now you’re comfortable with that that’s fantastic but also depending on the house it also means if the most common thing happens to it a roofing claim you might be paying to replace the majority of that roof yourself so these are things to consider and to look at and things that would be important to most homeowners and I think gives you a couple of tips and strategies to be able to assess your own policy yourself awesome day.
And we’re running out of time on this segment great information I’ve been talking with Dan Myers of the insurance store Dan thanks so much appreciate it yeah thanks for having me and now I’m going to turn my attention to again one of the things that we’ve had some great success with and that is the book Ready Set Sold well-proven steps to get your household for top dollar and fast in the metro area St. Louis area the reason why I say that is it’s absolutely free.
Maybe you’re not looking in January to put your house on the market maybe March maybe spring maybe the summertime whatever it highly encourages you to get the book readysetsold.org but readysetsold.org not com and pick up a free copy and I do mean free no strings attached love you have this information I’m passionate about real estate I want to help people and this book has proven to be very successful the people who get it and use it so with that said we’re also on podcasting is as you could go to Google Play or iTunes you missed a segment which happens sometimes or maybe you want to review a segment.
So now we have the ability if you go to either one of those places we Ready Set Sold you just look us up it’s already identified what the podcast is it has a date it has what is talked about so it’s great way to get information we always love it if you like us on Facebook Ready Set Sold with Bryan Vogt and also on all other things too we have YouTube so there are just different ways that we can get the information out because that’s really what we’re trying to do here is give you information that you can use when it comes to selling your biggest asset and that is your house without that I’ll be back with the tips of the week.
Ready Set Sold with Bryan Vogt #35-04: Dan Meyers: Be careful! Cheaper insurance payments may lead to huge deductibles
January 27, 2018