Homeowners Insurance For Florida

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In case you are with Florida's state run insurance provider, your home insurance rates are getting 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 may be losing significant discounts that could dramatically increase the expense of your homeowners insurance.

Presently, Florida homeowners enjoy what is known as a wind mitigation discount for various home features that will make your home more resistant to hurricanes. Home insurance companies are required to give you this discount under Florida law along with a specific formula can be used to calculate it. It provides discounts for things like the design of your roof, whether your roof has a secondary backup system for removing water, the methods used to attach houses roof to the walls of your property, and whether or not your property has hurricane shutters among 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 as well. One homeowner who had been showcased in the St. Petersburg Times invested $5,225 to strengthen the garage door as well as for hurricane shutters on his home in Spring Hill, Florida. He was very upset to find out that his $5,225 investment would only supply him with 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 provide 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 following the 2004/2005 hurricane season.

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

Some companies are ordering and investing in new mitigation inspections to get a more accurate picture of the property hardening mitigation steps which were performed on your home. If a re-inspection on your home produces discrepancies, you may lose some of your discounts and face an enormous increase in your Florida home insurance premiums.

From your perspective as a homeowner, rolling back these discounts would add significantly towards the cost of your Florida home insurance. And this would happen during one of many worst recessions during our lifetimes. For many 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 Florida homeowners needs to be following. Even slight changes for the mitigation discounts might cause massive increases in Florida home insurance premiums that will make the rate increases already approved seem like small change!