I had the honor to be a guest on Akers Financial Group’s weekly radio show on 105.7.
Brian Akers CFP, the owner of Akers Financial Group located in Forest Hill, MD, was the host and we dove into the topic of “Protecting Your Wealth”.
In Part 2/3 we dive into coverage of car and home insurance. Mountain View Insurance Solutions is a Bel Air, Maryland insurance agency and we service all of Maryland and the surrounding states as well. For a quote click here.
You can find Brian’s website here: http://www.akersfinancial.com/
Transcription:
00:00 What we’re trying to cover today is about protecting your wealth through auto and homeowners insurance and making sure we have the right coverages is a very important piece when we’re making sure that our retirement plan is going to work throughout your retirement years and that’s why having the right amount of insurance that Jesse be speaking at two o’clock that day. Two o’clock. Okay. Do you, have you picked that, your clothing for that day yet? Probably what you see here, I’m just going to keep it simple. You might do a blue blazer.
01:11 Yeah, just a blue blazer. There you go. Look for me. Six foot four blue blazer. You’ll see me
01:15 and says Calvert Hall and his Hairdo. There’s a look, there’s a Calvert hall look. Well, I know there’s Loyola. Look for the listeners. Okay, but don’t get too too heavy on this, but Akers financial. We have a website, Akersfinancial.com you can go on there and you can find out about the expo. You can also cause an 833 AFG team and we could connect you to Jesse or any other questions you might have about financial planning, investments, insurance, things like that. All right, so we’ve been talking about auto insurance. Let’s cover a couple more things. Okay. All right. We were talking about the idea on the automobile insurance policy, there’s a certain amount that takes sound. Most of the premium, you’re saying the comprehensive and collision and we’re given the general advice that you need to look at your collision cars and the older they get, you might want to drop the collision. How would you know the right time to drop collision? In general terms,
02:08 right? If the card is over 10 years old, start to consider it. I’ve actually had collision and comprehensive on a 15 year old cart that got totaled and it was my fault and I got a $2,000 check. Right? And I was excited because I was like 20 years old. Okay. So if you’re willing to pay for the coverage, wonderful, go for it. But that’s a conversation you can have with your broker.
02:29 And so as you’re, as you’re building your emergency fund and savings, one of the ways to save, I haven’t enough savings is when the car valuations drops way down. You don’t need to be paying the extra premium anymore. Exactly. Self insure. Exactly. All right. So, and the auto policy, there’s another piece down there and caught him. Uninsured motorist or uninsured motors, uninsured motorists. That is coverage when someone else who’s not in short hits us.
02:53 Exactly. So there’s people on the road. Imagine when you’re on six 95 right? Look around someone there
02:59 does not have insurance. Yeah. So someone doesn’t have insurance and most likely that’s the one that we might hit you.
03:05 Right? And if that happens and you have appropriate uninsured motorist coverage, then that’s as if they had bodily injury coverage. And cause if they had a policy, that’s what you
03:15 policy picks up. Right? So the on the policy and bodily injury section ensures the other people, the uninsured motorist and chores, you and your family in case that person with no insurance hits you and hurts you. Right? So if you have low coverage on the top, on the bodily injury, you cannot get more coverage than that for yourself
03:36 point. Absolutely. So the Max that you can get on uninsured is what you have as bodily injury, which is the top
03:44 coverage and cause this story, the story I think about is what if someone uninsured hits you and your family and then you look at, Oh, I only have 50, 50, a hundred or a hundred, 300 and all of a sudden my family needs to go to shock trauma and we have these major life events. Exactly. And I saved a little bit of money on my insurance by not having half a million or a million. Yeah, that’s very true. So when it comes down to financial planning advice on ensuring the family for the worst case scenario, um, the uninsured motorist is important to me, which then drives the other liability section up higher if we go and bring that up to a million dollar. She was saying, I’m an umbrella. Does that ensure bodily injury and, and the uninsurance lunch aren’t very good question.
04:30 That’s your option. Sure. You can do either or you could have an umbrella policy that ensures just if you were to hurt someone and get sued or you can have it increase your coverage for uninsured motorist to,
04:42 and I believe that’s a great place to me. Now I do have to be fair, I am also licensed prompting Caswell you’ve known, I mean I know this since like the early 1990s but um, I’ve always had an expert to work with on property and casual. They have never been the actual agent on it. Um, except for being someone who understands what’s going on. So the reason I’m, we have you in here today is to talk about protecting people’s wealth. We’ve talked about auto and home and that we talked about home. So I had not talking about how many are we talking about auto homeowners. I’ll explain a little bit about homeowner’s policies, talking about homeowners and also those renting people like that.
05:19 Okay. Love it. So homeowners insurance, before I dive directly into it, think of insurance. It’s like this wonderful financial product that you can leverage your money. So when you think about that, you put your money into a large pot and if your house burns down, it can be rebuilt, right? Your House is worth three hundred thousand five hundred thousand a million dollars in your insurance policies, that thousand dollars a year. Okay. Take that concept of car insurance to umbrella insurance and the other insurances that your office offers. Life Insurance, right. It’s a wonderful product. But home insurance in particular, that’s usually protecting people’s largest asset amp, the house. Right? I mean, you’re a financial advisor. Is that, do you see that often? That’s one of their largest assets. Um, hopefully not, but right. It is a very large asset. Yes. Right, right. So usually the biggest tangible asset, we protect it through homeowner’s insurance.
06:11 We usually combined the car insurance and the home insurance carrier because you get around a 20% bundled discount. Sure. But that doesn’t happen everywhere. That’s fine. Yeah. I’ve seen that many times where they don’t have it all at one place. Yeah. We always like to try to do that. If we can. There’s some scenarios where we can’t, now you, you’re a insurance broker. Can do you mind mentioning that a little bit, what that means. Right. So let’s say, you know, Brian, we’re talking about your homeowner’s insurance. Sure. And you live out there and the house has this characteristics I know as a broker, which insurance carriers like that risk, right? So you represent multiple insurance carriers. Yeah. So then we go back to the board and we look at our 20 plus carriers and we say, which one of you is going to be most competitive with Brian’s scenario?
06:56 Right. With the understanding that I’ve already done the homework to make sure you have proper coverages, right? Yup. Okay. So broker is somebody who represent multiple companies. You’re not a career agent for one individual company. Right. I used to work for state farm. Wonderful companies. Still is a wonderful company. That’s where I learned this trade. Sure. But I decided when I got out that I was going to be a broker and represent many companies for my clients. And that the, um, the idea of the homeowners, the homeowners there as if you own the house, there’s different types of coverages. What’s in what’s in a normal policy. Okay. Biggest one is dwelling coverage. Coverage. A look at your declarations page at the very top. Boom, 500,000 for your dwelling limit. And that will cover if something happens to your house, right? The house burns down, God forbid, that is the limit that the insurance company will pay.
07:44 So if the adjuster comes out and says, Hey Brian, how’s burnt down? I’m so sorry. He knows in the back of his head, 500,000 is the limit that they will pay. Right. But the insurance company usually puts a cushion on top of that too, of around 2020 5%. Okay. Yeah. So they’ll actually pay higher. That’s a cushion just in case the insurance person professional doesn’t do a good job and ensure it correctly. Okay. Yeah. So that’s if there’s a fire or partial damage, anything like that. A is the dwelling itself, the replacement of it, and then we still buy replacement versus actual value. Right? Yeah. Good point. Replacement costs versus actual cash value. Um, there are still actual cash value policies. If you remember last year it was the big windstorm. Right? Um, I think around this time of the year, um, I had people calling me that head ACV or depreciated value policies and the roof blew off.
08:36 The insurance company is going to pay you a depreciated value for that roof, which is pennies on the dollar. Right. So if you ever see an actual, an ECV policy, what do you do? We switched it to get it out of that. Usually those policies are reserved for vacant homes or homes that are beat up. Right. I seen him on some old houses, people who just just never changed our coverage. They had it there, right? Yeah. So we’ll, we’ll find it, we’ll see it and if we see it, we’ll try to replace it if we can. Now, the worst case I’ve ever heard of was a family where they had their homeowner’s insurance ensure both so under insured that the replacement policy didn’t work and that it’s flipped to ACV really cause they’re an, they were underinsured greatly. There’s a rule that you need to have at least 80% of actual value of the insurer pays to review with your agent or your broker every, let’s say five years or so.
09:29 Absolutely. And make sure the value of the replacements and reasonable and in short, properly. Yeah. So the biggest and I agree 100%, the biggest thing is the coverage at the top. Coverage, a dwelling coverage. Then I’d like your eyes to go to personal liability coverage. Okay. If John comes over and trips and falls and say, look, Brian, you’re liable. That was your fault. You put that stone there, right? Liability coverage picks up up to 500,000 if you have that limit. Right? Which we like to put that limit all. And if we can have of protecting your assets, so we’re coming back to protecting your wealth. You had a gun, right? Um, and then as an add on, this is an endorsement. This is not on every policy is water backup of sewer drains. Right? That’s the horror story. That’s the horror story. Because in Maryland, everyone has basements, right?
10:13 Yes, we do. Right? In basements in Hawaii? No, it’s, it’s lava. I mean again, toe down post and pier. They built up in Maryland. If it rains, which has been raining a lot in your sump pump fails water becomes in the basement through the French drain or whatever. If you don’t have that special coverage, you have no coverage because it’s not automatically covered. No, it’s usually not on a policy. It’s an extra extra inbox. You have to check on. What is it called again? Water backup of sewer and drain coverage and CS. Check your declaration page. See if you have that coverage at all. Replacement cost on personal property is also higher your homeowners. Exactly. Yeah. You were a PNC agent. You know your stuff. I’m dangerous. You know, every 30 years you learn something Louise. So yeah. Personal property. The things in your house.
11:01 Yeah. Okay. If you take your house, turn it upside down and shake it. What comes out of the house is your personal property. Okay. You can either have this thing, are we still on the castle or we’re in a house or an act. It can be a castle if you want to go back to the first cigarette. Okay. But this house, you’re shaking it, things are falling out. That’s insured, those things that are loose. Yeah, I use that illustration because those are the loose things are closed. Your couch, that’s your personal property that can be ensured to replacement cost or ACV. Sure. And it’s preferable for the client to have replacement cost, but that doesn’t mean everything is fully insured. Cause in your policy and depending on what level will policy you buy with a company, there will be different limits on certain items. What kind of items have limitations?
11:45 Right? Right. So at the back end of the policy, you’ll see special limits on firearms. Okay. Big One. Usually 20 or 5,000 jewelry. Huge. Yeah. You know, an engagement ring is easily six, 10 grand. Right. And they’re not hard to ensure. I mean that’s $50 $200 a year. But that’s a special add on policy scheduled property writer. It can be a writer or some carriers do a separate policy called a personal articles policy. Okay. Sarah by itself. The uh, the idea of cash in your house, there’s an insurance amount for that too. Right? There is usually 2,500. How about we all had technology, we have phone, iPad, laptop. What kind of limits are on policies for that? It depends on the carrier but usually they fall within the um, personal property. Sure. Yeah. Just like a TV would but no limit though. No, no limit.
12:35 But some carriers may, it’s carrier to carrier. Now if we are working out of our house, we have business at the home, right? That already in short and our homeowners or do we have the gas separate policy. Okay. That’s an endorsement called business pursuits. Okay. Now if you get sued due to having business pursuits, you know, your client comes to your house trips and falls, Susie, you okay? Well, base policy won’t cover that I have, but if you’re just working on your house, um, would your business, computer business items a Davy and short? You can have a endorsement to do that. But I think the point with that is let your broker know what’s going on in the whole situation. And try to be honest with them. We’re trying to hide it, hold it back. Definitely be honest because as a broker I’m an advocate for the client.
13:18 Sure. Right. Cause I represent many carriers. I can be an advocate for the client to help them find the best solution for their needs. Right. And then that helps them protect their wealth by knowing what situation they’re in. I’ll send knowing everyone that lives at the house, everyone that, everything that’s going on there. Right. Because the last thing you want to do is have some sort of fraud situation or you held something back. Right. And then they just deny the claim and they get nothing when you need it most. Exactly. Which happens. All right. So today we’re talking with Jessie Cunningham of mountain view insurance about protecting your wealth with their auto home and umbrella insurance. And our last segment, we’re going to review our expo that’s coming up April 5th that’s going to be in the afternoon on April 5th at water’s edge and Bell Camp Maryland. A wonderful place right beside them.
14:01 We have four or five classrooms per hour and different classes going on. Go to our website, Akers, financial.com find out more information about that and also stay tuned for right after this. Where are we covering umbrella insurance? We can’t wait.