Umbrella insurance

[babbles]

same with USAA, that umbrella keeps getting wider and wider with the addition of anything and had to raise our liability limits to 300k,

good point!

[xenon3030]

To get umbrella insurance, the auto insurance should be 250k/500k and the home insurnace should be 300k/600k.

[longtimelurker]

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@xenon3030 wrote:

To get umbrella insurance, the auto insurance should be 250k/500k and the home insurnace should be 300k/600k.

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that must be for a specific company, as 300/300 worked for us for auto.   What even is the home insurance limits there?

[xenon3030]

The limits possibly depend on the insurance company and also the property type (for home insurance). My atuo insurance max policy was 250k/500k (the upgrade from 100k/300k required only paying a few cents more per month!!!).

[Aim_High]

I personally don't recommend umbrella insurance. 

When my umbrella breaks, I just buy another one!   

*The Samsonite Windguard Auto Open Umbrella comes highly recommended at only $26.25 on sale now. 

Apologies but I couldn't help myself as this was my first thought when I saw the thread title. 

[xenon3030]

Lol. It might be better to label it as PUP (Personal Umbrella Policy). Anyway, it is not easy to shop PUP and I am still in the market.

RLI was asking for a 500k/500k coverage by my car insurance (CA requirement). My car insurance maximum coverage is 250k/500k (Metromile).

Markel did not like my car insurance financial rating and asked to change my car insurance

Stillwater did not like one minor at-fault incident in the past 5 years .

I talked to a few Chubb agencies and it seems that they are mainly supporting very rich customers (with helicopter, several antique cars, ...).

[longtimelurker]

Following your post, I decided to shop around as I thought at least my house policy was too expensive.   The independent agent came up with a package where car insurance was about $100 more, home was $600 less and (outside the package, because we have a dog breed the auto/home insurance company doesn't like) umbrella was $200 more.  Total was about $2,800.  To be fair, some features were better, such as the home insurnace covering $1M liability rather than $300K

As the agent didn't take credit cards without a 3.5% surcharge, the savings were fairly small.    So I called my existing company (Geico) and they came with a better home insurance for $650 less, while keeping the other coverages, so a fairly big win!

Thanks @xenon3030 even if that wasn't the intention of your post!

[xenon3030]

Sounds good @longtimelurker. I will check with them tomorrow to get quotations on home/auto bundles and PUP (to issue PUP, Geico needs either home or auto policy with them).

Bundling might not always help to reduce the entire insurance cost. Each of my home and car insurance is around $1200/year (total~$2400) while I am getting quotations of even ~7k from some agents (bundled) to be able to get Umbrella policy from that specific provider (PUP~$300). They also say that it is hard for them to beat my current home and auto policy rates, even with bundling.

[Brian_Earl_Spilner]

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@longtimelurker wrote:

I'm with Geico (well, home insurance is through Liberty Mutual through Geico).   For Umbrella, we had to increase some limits on Auto Insurance (I think some categories went from $100K/$300K ( per person/per incident) to $300k/$300K which wasn't too expensive).

Once we moved the property into a trust we had some issues, being told, wrongly, that they cannot deal with that.

So not a strong recommendation, just much much cheaper for auto than our old insurance (metlife), but part of that might have been that you should never stick with an insurance company, new ones give better rates!

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Geico is on the higher end right now because they're aggressively raising their rates. All the other insurance companies are behind the curve. They'll catch up eventually and Geico will look like a bargain again. 

[xenon3030]

Geico says that in CA, they use RLI to issue a personal umbrella policy. Since RLI needs a 500k/500k auto coverage, one option is moving my auto insurance to Geico to increase my limit from 250k/500k to 500k/500k but Geico's auto quotation was more than 2x of my current rate. I keep looking...