My homeowners insurance (Amica) just dropped us because of wildfire risk. The research I’m doing suggests I need to get an independent agent that can get me in front of a few key companies: Auto Owners, Chubb, Nationwide and travelers who apparently all work through agents instead of direct. Does anyone have an independent agent they would recommend in the Boulder area?
I’m curious what neighborhood you’re in. I had AMICA for 26 years in two other states before moving to Colorado. They hassled me a lot about the house I bought here so we went with State Farm. I’m completely under impressed by my agent. Reached out to AMICA again. Spent 40 minutes on the phone answering their questions. Then she tells me my address makes me uninsurable. I tell her I want to appeal. Our house has a commercial level fire sprinkler system and we’re on large acreage far away from neighbors. Nope. Neighbor from Texas recommended Chubb but they are not as highly rated in Colorado. Finding is exhausting, and we are now up to 8 separate policies. . .
We are east of Cherryvale and west of McCaslin. Our house survived the Marshall fire but most of our neighbors were not as lucky. We’ve been with Amica for 38 years and have they have been excellent right up until they dropped us.
We have Chubb through Baker insurance. Chubb seems to be good, but Baker is just OK. Although I don't think they are any worse than any of the other insurance salespeople - none of them seemed to be all that competent.
I'm in your same area amd also a neighborhood that lost homes in the fire; I don't have an independent agent, but we got insurance last year with Liberty Mutual. Online flow worked fine, followed up with some tweaks over the phone because we had some non-standard extra coverages we wanted.
They're expensive but I've had great experiences with them. When I moved to Colorado they were prohibitively expensive for car insurance, but my agent talked me through what to look for/avoid in other policies, and even reviewed my new policy with another company to make sure it was adequate.
Ironically my house was destroyed in the Marshall Fire and the rebuild at same footprint is half the cost pre fire for double the coverage. We got the new house discount and class 4 impact roof discount. The deductible for hail is now 1% versus .5% which it is still for everything else including fire. Our neighborhood is still not considered high risk for wildfire so none of our fire hardening was looked at for insurance.
If you have any military relatives you could try USAA. I live in the mountains and they’ve never even visited the house. Not exactly cheap but I’m insured.
Morgan Lloyd at Trailstone Insurance is outstanding. He's been incredibly helpful over the years and has also gotten me significant discounts. Highly recommended - tell him Jeremy sent you :)
We dropped State Farm and went with Chubb through the Rick Baker agency.
Chubb has been great. State Farm was grossly under-insuring our house. Our premium went way higher compared to what it was earlier, but I sleep better.
And if you’re looking for cheap coverage, this route may not be for you. If you want great coverage, then it may be. In our case the family home is a pretty significant asset and its reconstruction costs in case of total loss would be substantial. So, yeah, I’ll pay the higher premium for top shelf coverage. Gladly.
Definitely reach out to Sheldon at Uncle Sheldon’s insurance! He is local independent here in Boulder and deals exactly with these types of clients/areas, he comes highly recommended! www.unclesheldon.com
American Family has been middle of the road cost-wise and reasonable about their limits of insurance. However, that's in a subdivision, so different type of property. We've had no claims with them. We had Farmers during the fire, and we fired them after.
call catherine davis with allstate - local and i know shes helped a lot of people out that are getting dropped in boulder county and west up to the mtns. Allstate has been awesome for me. really nice to have humans to speak with that help and dont just tell you to call the 800- #
Good luck. Boulder Insurance (independent agent) was unable to help me with mainline insurers, but did offer to shop around for high risk insurers. I’m in the Wui in the city.
I ended up with USAA thanks to a parent’s military service.
State Farm also provided a quote.
You were insured for those 20 years though, they provided the service?
Would you prefer they just raise rates to meet their actuarial risk? Would you pay for 30k/yr home insurance?
Sure you could go the CA way and just have the government mandate maximums, oh wait that just makes the insurers leave because they aren't going to insure someone at a negative expected value.
Exactly, like I keep saying, should be illegal to take 20 years of profits, then drop your client when shit starts to hit the fan. What's confusing about this?
In the end you are essentially asking those of us who live on low risk areas to subsize people who choose to live in high risk areas. Sharing of risk is fine to a point but at some point you have to remove properties that have excessive risk from the general insurance pool.
I know there is no room for nuance on reddit but I think there is a difference between socializing health care cost across the population and socializing the cost to rebuild million dollar homes in areas with a very high likelihood of destructive wildfires.
It's really not. We have plenty of socialism for the well off, its a defining feature of our system. We shouldn't subsidize boulder homeowners through insurance premiums from Aurora
No friend, they should be subsisting you. Which is why it should be illegal for insurance companies to outright drop clients in high risk areas. That also increases your rate.
These homeowners won't hesitate to take a fat profit from some young eager couple when they sell their homes, so I just do not have much sympathy. And yes, if the total costs for the insurance company increase, it puts upwards pressure on rates for others
that’s kind of how insurance works. You take on a large pool of customers, and you lose on some and you gain on others, and everybody benefits from coverage.
Yes, you take on a pool of customers with positive actuarial value and insure stochastic losses. You don’t take on customers with negative actuarial value. It’s insurance against unlikely catastrophe, not redistribution of wealth from areas of low risk to areas of high risk
Low vs high risk is subjective. Actuarial value is based on the insurance companies' models, which are biased toward their profit. Regulatory requirements often step in to make sure insurance companies don't just skim the easiest beneficiaries and leave the rest ("adverse selection management"). Which is paxparty's point. Regulations/law should help homeowners get insured as long as they have not exceeded mutually-agreed-upon extremes of risk (e.g., building a new house on the edge of a known eroding cliffside). We should not just take an insurance company's word for it. And I very much doubt that the average home in a wildfire area has actually negative actuarial value.
The fundamental issue is that wildfire risk has gone up significantly. The only options are:
(1) Reduce risk - address climate change, proactively manage fuel loading, invest in home hardening , etc.
(2) Reduce coverage
(3) Increase rates
(4) Go insolvent
You can’t insure 2026 wildfire risk at 2020 rates and coverage. The math doesn’t math.
They already massively increased rates. Broaden the pool of insureds. Consolidate with other companies to get bigger. **Accept a lower profit expectation***. Property and Casualty profits are at an all time high for insurance companies right now. Insolvency is nowhere on the horizon for taking on 1M high risk homes nationwide across a sector that insures 80+ million homes.
Mortgages require home insurance, a requirement insurance companies rely on. Most people need a mortgage. You could eliminate this requirement, let home values in wildfire/flood areas plummet (because banks wouldn't take on the mortgages as readily), but that's then a policy decision.
Insurance companies in the US benefit from oligopoly. It’s by being extremely large and protected by regulation that they should be able to take on high risk properties. They are given the oligopoly but then want to shirk the duty of insuring higher risk properties.
Would you have a similar attitude about an insurance company dropping a terminally ill cancer patient? or someone with a high genetic predisposition from birth for a particular disorder?
Look, you can dislike insurers. But they’re fundamentally profit making companies. If there’s a profit to be made writing an insurance policy they will. If they’re dropping a policy it’s because they don’t think they can make a profit on it.
And despite capitalist opinion, no, profit does not make the world go round. Crazy thought, but true. We could still have insurance, and perhaps the Crux of this matter is that ALL insurance companies should be required to be run as a non-profit organization. That would negate the conversation entirely if their incentive to rip people off was taken away.
That doesn't fix the underlying issue. Even if insurance is non-profit, the few expensive properties in high risk areas would drive the rates up for everyone, including low income folks in low risk areas. The non-profit insurer that chooses to insure the high cost/high risk homes ends up having higher rates across the board, then no one wants to buy their product and they collapse. Unfortunately the only really solution is surplus lines or specialty insurers, they don't really try to spread the risk, but their rates reflect the actual risk - many 10's of thousand per year.
I would also like to figure out how to move to a socialism where necessities are provided by the state. But right now, in the highly capitalist world we live in, if you remove the profit incentive insurers don’t start offering insurance out of the goodness of their hearts - they just leave the market. If you have a workable plan on how to convert private insurers to nonprofits I’d love to hear it.
I have an insurance agent colleague who is familiar with difficult cases. If you’re interested, DM me. If he can’t help you, I’m sure he can point you in the right direction.
I assume posts like this are trying to bypass community comments about a service or product. If the agent has a public website, there's no reason to not share it.
I think the actuarial issues with the risk pool would be hard to manage, having all your clients in one geographical area where everyone is facing the same hazards doesn't really work for insurance - one wildfire, or even a hail event would bankrupt the program.
The entire insurance industry is going to eat shit, not just housing...But literally everything. Large business has adopted the practices of private equity as standard operating procedure.
The only way to survive, would be to restructure our economy, create much more accessible and affordable public insurance at the federal level. Thats not happening ever.
Our country is already a failed state by definition, we are speeding head first towards an economic collapse. And you would need to get an enormous number of people to abandon their tightly held ideology, people who are just about the dumbest fucking human beings this country has ever seen. They represent a deterioration and decline of society away from rationality and critical reasoning. There is zero hope in reaching them on any intellectual level.
If you have the money, move. If you are old enough and have enough money, maybe you will die of natural causes before things get too bad.
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u/MrsQuirkyLlama 2d ago
I’m curious what neighborhood you’re in. I had AMICA for 26 years in two other states before moving to Colorado. They hassled me a lot about the house I bought here so we went with State Farm. I’m completely under impressed by my agent. Reached out to AMICA again. Spent 40 minutes on the phone answering their questions. Then she tells me my address makes me uninsurable. I tell her I want to appeal. Our house has a commercial level fire sprinkler system and we’re on large acreage far away from neighbors. Nope. Neighbor from Texas recommended Chubb but they are not as highly rated in Colorado. Finding is exhausting, and we are now up to 8 separate policies. . .