topic Re: Umbrella insurance in Personal Finance

Umbrella insurance

xenon3030 — Sat, 23 Sep 2023 03:28:25 GMT

I plan to shop umbrella insurance (~2M coverage). Despite the simplicity to obtain quotation on auto and home insurances using online tools and websites, not all places provide umbrella coverage. To obtain a quotation, a direct call to the provider is also needed. Several providers also need auto or home insurance with them to be able to provide coverage or do not cover some states.

Which umbrella insurance do you use or recommend? Does it provide coverage both for domestic (all states) and international?

Re: Umbrella insurance

SouthJamaica — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 16:44:58 GMT

@xenon3030 wrote:
I plan to shop umbrella insurance (~2M coverage). Despite the simplicity to obtain quotation on auto and home insurances using online tools and websites, not all places provide umbrella coverage. To obtain a quotation, a direct call to the provider is also needed. Several providers also need auto or home insurance with them to be able to provide coverage or do not cover some states.

Which umbrella insurance do you use or recommend? Does it provide coverage both for domestic (all states) and international?

As of 20 or more years ago, when I last had an experience with it, Chubb was pretty good. They're certainly one to look at, but I would never recommend any insurance company, because from what I have seen none of them are any good.

Re: Umbrella insurance

babbles — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 16:37:50 GMT

I use USAA, have been for about four years now, they give great discounts for multi products

Re: Umbrella insurance

xenon3030 — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 17:19:54 GMT

I called USAA a few days ago and I was told that their insurance plans are limited to USAA members (veterans). It was despite the information on their webpage.

Re: Umbrella insurance

babbles — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 17:34:55 GMT

My apologies, I should have clarified that it's limited to military members

Re: Umbrella insurance

GreatLife — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 18:20:37 GMT

Travelers constantly extended offers to us for an umbrella policy. When we finally said OK, all was good & super easy until their checklist asked about other properties. They wouldn't umbrella because we owned a vacant duplex even though it was insured by another company. Also to note that standard Travelers won't include or offer flood insurance, but earthquake is an option. We never got to a point of asking if those would differ under umbrella. Perhaps call and inquire if they can assist your needs.

Good Luck

Re: Umbrella insurance

xenon3030 — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 22:34:31 GMT

Some insurance agents helped me on quotations from https://www.personalumbrella.com (got quotations from Markel and RLI). I am going with Markel now (covering both domestic and internatinal). Next year, I may spend more time to get more quotations from other places like Chubb.

I found it not straightforward to receive quotations on umbrella insurance (possibly auto and home insurance are their primary products). Not all insurances or agencies also cover it. Several insurance providers like Travelers/progressive provide umbrella only if having auto or home insurance with them. Bundling might not also help to reduce the net cost.

Re: Umbrella insurance

MileHigh96 — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 17:05:46 GMT

I use State Farm for our umbrella insurance. We also have our auto and homeowners insurance through them as well. There's a discount on premiums (usually) when you bundle your insurance with one company.

Re: Umbrella insurance

xenon3030 — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 17:16:48 GMT

StateFarm recently does not provide coverage in CA (no auto, no umbrella).

Re: Umbrella insurance

Anonymous — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 23:56:14 GMT

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!

Re: Umbrella insurance

babbles — Sat, 30 Sep 2023 15:23:31 GMT

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!

Re: Umbrella insurance

xenon3030 — Sat, 30 Sep 2023 16:26:43 GMT

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

Re: Umbrella insurance

Anonymous — Sat, 30 Sep 2023 21:28:15 GMT

@xenon3030 wrote:
To get umbrella insurance, the auto insurance should be 250k/500k and the home insurnace should be 300k/600k.

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

Re: Umbrella insurance

xenon3030 — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 00:16:42 GMT

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!!!).

Re: Umbrella insurance

Aim_High — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 01:55:51 GMT

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.

Re: Umbrella insurance

xenon3030 — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 02:27:49 GMT

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, ...).

Re: Umbrella insurance

Anonymous — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 02:52:11 GMT

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!

Re: Umbrella insurance

xenon3030 — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 04:19:09 GMT

Sounds good @Anonymous. 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.

Re: Umbrella insurance

Brian_Earl_Spilner — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 04:02:05 GMT

@Anonymous 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!

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.

Re: Umbrella insurance

xenon3030 — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 20:42:36 GMT

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...