Home Insurance

Cheap Florida Homeowners Insurance



If you are with Florida's state run insurance company, your home insurance rates are going up by approximately 10% this year. If you have your Florida home insurance with a private company, you will be facing rate increases from 10-15%. However, if Florida insurance companies have their way, you could be losing significant discounts that can dramatically increase the price of your homeowners insurance.

Cheap Florida Homeowners Insurance

Currently, Florida homeowners enjoy what is known as a wind mitigation discount for various home features that make your home more resistant to hurricanes. Home insurance companies are required to give you this discount under Florida law plus a specific formula should be used to calculate it. It provides discounts for things like the shape of your roof, whether your homes roof has a secondary backup system for removing water, the strategy used to attach houses roof to the walls of your home, and whether or not your home has hurricane shutters and others.



Home insurance consumers in Florida have enjoyed these discounts which is often up to 50% of the wind premium on the home. However, homeowners sometimes are disappointed with those discounts also. One homeowner who had been showcased in the St. Petersburg Times invested $5,225 to boost the garage door as well as for hurricane shutters on his home in Spring Hill, Florida. He was very upset to discover that his $5,225 investment would only give him a discount of $16.11! Other homeowners in Florida have saved far more.



Started in 2002 together with improvements to the Florida building code, these wind mitigation discounts were a significant step in the process to deliver lower Florida home insurance rates to those with homes less likely to sustain serious damage inside a Florida hurricane. Those discounts were doubled by the state of Florida in 2006 so that you can provide some rate relief after the 2004/2005 hurricane season.



Right now with the approach of the 2010 Florida legislative session, property insurance companies are asking legislatures to reduce some of those discounts. In certain areas the companies could have a point. For starters, there does appear to be a certain amount of fraud related to those discounts. This fraud could possibly be the result of homeowners misrepresentations and in addition due to errors inside the findings from the home inspection. In any case it could lead to homes being granted discounts they're not entitled to. Companies also explain that the doubling of those discounts in 2006 was really a political reaction to high rates than a scientific process to price the discount depending on the real way a property would perform during a hurricane.



Some companies are ordering and investing in new mitigation inspections to acquire a more accurate picture of the house hardening mitigation steps which have been performed on your home. In case a re-inspection on your home produces discrepancies, you could lose some of your discounts and face a huge increase in your Florida property insurance premiums.



From your perspective like a homeowner, rolling back these discounts would add significantly for the cost of your Florida homeowners insurance. And this would happen during one of the worst recessions during our lifetimes. For some Florida homeowners having these mitigation discounts modified or eliminated could result in thousands of dollars in additional premium costs.



It is a critical development that most Florida homeowners needs to be following. Even slight changes for the mitigation discounts might lead to massive increases in Florida home insurance premiums that will make the pace increases already approved appear to be small change!