Insurance Essentials Videos

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The Travelers umbrella logo. Text: 3. Ideas When Buying a Home.

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JOAN WOODWARD:

(DESCRIPTION) A woman stands at a podium with the logos: Travelers Institute, Travelers. Text: Austin, TX, November 20, 2014. Joan Woodward, President, Travelers Institute; Executive Vice President, Public Policy, Travelers.

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The event today we're hosting is consumer education around insurance. So we launched a nationwide series of educational informational events to help consumers understand what they're buying.

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Text and logos: Insurance Essentials, Your Questions Answered. Travelers Institute (registered trademark), Travelers.

#1, Know your market.

Eric Copper, Broker, Austin Portfolio Real Estate.

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ERIC COPPER: With the growth that we're experiencing here, people come into the market and they aren't able to grasp it. They're used to a buyer's market, which we are not. So what we're finding is a lack of understanding and people coming in expecting to negotiate at a high level which, in a seller's market, there just isn't that level of negotiating.

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#2, Consult an insurance agent.

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MARY RUSSELL:

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Mary Russell, Managing Director, Personal Insurance/Chief of Administration, Higginbotham Insurance & Financial Services.

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When you start looking or you've decided on which home you're going to buy, then start talking to an insurance agent. I'm always going to recommend an independent insurance agent because I've got products. My job is to represent the buyer. I've got the different insurance companies that we're representing, not just me, any insurance, independent insurance agent.

But they're going to have a number of insurance companies and a number of products so that they're putting together that package of insurance that meets your need. As opposed to some insurance companies that have their product and it's sometimes maybe not customized to meet your needs.

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#3, Understand the mortgage process.

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SEAN CONDON:

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Sean Condon, Private Mortgage Banker, Wells Fargo Private Mortgage Banking. 

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I can pass over a preapproval letter to their realtor and then they can start shopping for homes. Once something goes to contract, we would just start lock in a rate. Moving forward, we'd begin our underwriting process. The deal comes out approved typically in about a week or so

And then there's always going to be a secondary question from the underwriters. Can I see updated pay stubs? Whatever that is, letter of explanation if there's something we need to work around. We collect those items, submit the file back in for what's called our clear to close. Typically, that process is about 30 days.

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Logos: Travelers Institute (registered trademark). Travelers. Text: TravelersInstitute dot org. Hashtag, ThinkSafe.

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JOAN WOODWARD: The Travelers Institute sits within the very large Travelers Insurance Company, one of the largest property and casualty insurance companies in the country. The mission of the Travelers Institute is really to educate and inform and be a resource for consumers, for businesses, and policymakers.

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Text next to a checkmark reads, Insurance Essentials. Your questions answered. Travelers Institute ‘(registered trademark). Travelers. Text: Number 1: When should you start thinking about homeowner’s insurance? A man sits at the panel table, wearing a suit and a name tag next to Linda Jordan. Text: Erick Geitner, Senior Vice President, Cadence Bank Mortgage Division.

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ERICK GEITNER: Insurance is not something you want to wait until just before closing because we're looking very, very closely at debt to income. What is your income versus your total obligation? And guess what, insurance is part of that obligation.

It's your PITIs, principal interest, taxes and insurance. So, you want to get with your insurance agent early in the process and start doing the research. So, we as a lender can accurately work up what your total obligation is.

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Number 2: How do you find the right homeowners insurance policy for you? A woman on the five-person panel sits between Joan and Jimmie Gale Berg. She wears a black jacket. Text: Dee Ann Binion, Vice President, Cadence Insurance.

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DEE ANN BINION: Think of your independent agent. We are out there to help you. We represent a lot of different companies. We can give you a broad spectrum of pricing if we have the expertise because these policies are not all the same, and we can help you to know what the differences are and what might be best for your particular circumstances. What you had five years ago may not be what's best for you now.

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Text: Number 3: What should you do if you have a claim? Jimmie Gale Berg sits at the far right end of the panel table. Text: Jimmie Gale Berg, Branch Manager, Cadence Insurance.

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JIMMIE GALE BERG: You really don't want to do permanent repairs because if the adjusters go out there and there's nothing for them to see, that's pretty much what you're going to get paid. But pull your carpet out, dry it out, put tarps on there if you have to. If you have to pull everything out and put it in the front yard so it's not continuing to destroy the sheetrock in your house. Do those things, but make sure that everything that you remove from the inside is somewhere on the property for the adjusters to be able to see and definitely call as soon as you have the opportunity.

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Text: Travelers Institute (registered trademark). Travelers. TravelersInstitute dot-org. Hashtag ThinkSafe.

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JOAN WOODWARD: Travelers Institute is the public policy arm of the Travelers Insurance company, and we're very thrilled to be here in Glenwood Springs today.

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Text next to a checkmark reads, Insurance Essentials. Your questions answered. Travelers Institute (registered trademark). Travelers. Text: Number 1: Clear debris that could ignite a fire. A man in a fire department uniform sits at a panel table between Joan and Amy Luetke. Text: Gary Tillotson, Fire Chief, Glenwood Springs Fire Department.

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GARY TILLOTSON: Unfortunately, most of the area that Glenwood Springs Fire serves is in an extreme fire area, and that's primarily due to vegetation and slope. There are a lot of mitigation things that can be done. Having gutters full of leaves, not only affects the drainage, but it's also an ember trap. So if a wildfire is a mile away on a strong, windy day, embers can land in your gutters, land in that little bed of leaves, and now we have a roof fire at that house.

Decks, combustible decks, seem to catch a lot of embers, firewood piles that make good traps. We have a lot of things around our houses that can just gather embers as they're blowing through the air.

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Text: Number 2: Insure your home for its cost to rebuild, not market value. A woman in a scarf sits next to Jeremy Joslin at the panel table. Text: Kim Hammon, Personal Lines Producer, Glenwood Insurance Agency.

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KIM HAMMON: You wanted that replacement cost because those building materials, the cost to rebuild is much different, higher typically than it is to ensure fair market value or assessed value.

JOAN WOODWARD: How do you know what the cost is to rebuild your house if you've been in it for 20, 30 years.

KIM HAMMON: We have a schematic and questions and answers where we ask all kinds of questions about the features of the home, the year built, the square footage. We really get detailed, the type of flooring, the type of counters, the type of cabinets. We ask a lot of detailed questions. And it goes in and it calculates what the replacement cost would be for this region. So it goes by demographics and by territory.

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Text: Number 3: Document your home's contents. The audience members at the panel event sit at round dining tables. They look toward Kim.

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Well, I recommend people that have a home or contents or contents policy is to walk through your house, take pictures, if it's going to be video off of an iPad or put it on a thumb drive or whatever, but store it off premises, and you walk through room by room. 

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A screen in the room reads, Contents Inventory. How to start: Take pictures. Video record it. Create an electronic file. Store the list, photos and tapes together. Consider expensive items and make sure that you have enough insurance.

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It helps with, in a claim situation, remembering what you have because in the event of a total loss, it's really difficult to remember what you had.

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Text: Travelers Institute (registered trademark). Travelers. TravelersInstitute dot-org. Hashtag ThinkSafe.

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The Travelers umbrella logo. Text: 3. Ideas for Fire Protection. 

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JOAN WOODWARD:

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A woman stands at a podium with the text: Travelers Institute. Text: Rochester, NH, April 24, 2015. Joan Woodward, President, Travelers Institute; Executive Vice President, Public Policy, Travelers.

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We host these events around the country. They are educational, informational. There is true, unbiased information.

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Text and logos: Insurance Essentials, Your Questions Answered. Travelers Institute (registered trademark), Travelers.

#1, Update smoke detectors.

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KEITH HOYLE:

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Keith Hoyle, Fire Chief, Somersworth Fire Department.

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Statistically, in your lifetime, three unwanted fires is probably what you're going to encounter. Go home and look at your smoke detectors and make sure that they say photoelectric and not ionization, because a photoelectric smoke detector responds 3, 4, or 5 times as fast in a home fire than an ionization smoke detector.

DALE SPRAGUE:

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Dale Sprague, Associate Broker, Realtor (registered trademark), Avalar Advantage Real Estate. 

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If you are going to replace your smoke detectors, I would advise anybody to get the voice installed ones, too. It says actually, fire, fire, fire, instead of just the continuous beep that we have. There's a study that came forward a few years back that said children don't respond to that sound. They will respond to the voice.

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#2, Consider a home sprinkler system.

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KEITH HOYLE: If you can buy a house with fire sprinklers in, do it. Fire sprinklers, especially residential fire sprinklers, there's been no recorded deaths in a building that had properly designed and maintained fire sprinklers.

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#3, Insure your home for its full replacement cost.

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BRAD SCOTT:

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Brad Scott, President, Spence & Mathews Insurance.

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And that's one thing that I would have to say homebuyers have the most questions about. Oftentimes, the replacement costs can be two, three, four, or five times the market value. Homebuyers are looking to insure the home for what they purchase it for.

So a replacement cost analysis, it really isn't going to impact your land value if your home is destroyed. It needs to be reconstructed. So the land and the site work has an awful lot to do with the market value. But the insurance agent and the homeowner need to work closely together to try to establish what the replacement cost of just the building would be. 

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Logos: Travelers Institute (registered trademark). Travelers. Text: TravelersInstitute dot org. Hashtag, ThinkSafe.