(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm your host, Chris Hutchins, and today I wanna do a deep dive on insurance. I've thought a lot about insurance and even written a few newsletters, but after going through the process to redo most of our policies the last few weeks, I thought now would be the perfect time for this episode.

So I'm gonna cover how I ran a process to save as much as possible on our insurance while I was still making sure I had good coverage. I'm gonna talk about the policies I've been focusing on recently, which include home, auto, umbrella, and personal articles, but I'm also gonna cover renters, life, disability, long-term care, pet, and even travel insurance.

Consider this episode a one-stop shop for me to share the learnings from hundreds of hours of conversations and research. And I really hope you enjoy it, but more importantly, I hope it helps you save money and get the right coverages. But I should remind you all that I am not an insurance professional and all my research was mostly done for California, which may be different than your state, so please do your own research as well, but let's get into it right after this.

Okay, before we get started, I just wanna talk about why this is so top of mind for me, just so you guys have some context. So a few things have been happening all at the same time, really. One, our new au pair, Stefania, is from Italy and we're adding her to our auto policy so that she can drive with our car and take our kids to museums and that kind of thing.

That means that I'm gonna be adding a 24-year-old to our policy, which is gonna have a huge impact on rates, and so shopping around actually really, really matters. But also, I've talked in the past about how this year is really a year of consolidation for me, and so I've already done this with banking and investing accounts, closing things down, trying to get them all in one place, but I hadn't done this with insurance.

And honestly, I'm having second thoughts being almost at the finish line now about how valuable it really is to get all your insurance policies at one place from a convenience standpoint. I'll talk about bundling and why it might be worth it from a pricing standpoint, but at the end of the day, if I can save 500 or $700 a year and have to pay bills to two different insurance companies, does it really matter?

So I'll come back to that, but there are a couple reasons why I think this is important, even if there's not something like that going on in your life. First off, I was reading this stat that 76% of consumers who shopped saved money when they started shopping for new insurance.

So if you like saving money, which if you're listening to this podcast, I assume you do, you should definitely be shopping for insurance, at least on a regular basis. That doesn't mean every week or every month, maybe every year or two. The other thing is things change. Your home value changes, the amount of miles you drive, your car changes.

So I think there might be things happening in your life that make it worth re-evaluating, if not your insurance carrier, at least what your coverage is. But I wanna point out that this is not all just about price. I've read hundreds of Reddit comments from people about their claims experiences with different carriers.

Some of those comments were written by attorneys who actually fight these insurance companies, people who've had to go through the process, and it seems like a big component that keeps coming out is that you get what you pay for. Now, I have some specific examples of this, but at the same time, I wanna make sure everyone also knows that insurance companies are heavily regulated.

So while one insurer might be more generous with the cash value of your car or make the claims process a lot less work or hassle, I generally am not worried that a carrier might not actually pay out on a claim. And in California, as long as your policy is with an admitted carrier, and you'd probably know if it wasn't 'cause you had to sign something agreeing that you know they're not admitted, the state actually provides a backstop if the carrier were to fail financially.

So when I say you get what you pay for, yes, that might mean an easier process, better customer service, faster payout, but it could also be the way the policy is written or the features it includes or even some of the extra features you can add on. For example, on homeowner's insurance, it might be whether your policy even includes coverage for water backing up in your house.

With Lemonade, it's not included by default. It might be included, but limited to only 10% of your home coverage amount, which is the most common I've seen, or from some premium carriers, it might actually be covered up to the entire coverage level of your home, which is less common, but obviously a much better, more comprehensive coverage.

On auto, most auto policies will offer some type of rental car coverage in case you can't drive your car because it's in the shop, but a lot of them have coverage that's like $30 or $50 max per day, up to $1,500 total. But some carriers like USAA will not only let you pick the vehicle type, so you can ensure you have a large SUV to replace your large SUV, which might really matter, but they might not have a cap.

They might not have a limit to how many days you can rent a car. So those are some examples of why you get what you pay for might be a little different, but I will come back to all the features that I found when I talk about each type of policy.

I just wanna give you a quick idea of what I'm thinking about when I talk about something that might be a higher quality policy and why it's not about whether you're actually going to get paid, and it might be about other things. So let's jump in first and start with auto.

According to the Association for Safe International Road Travel, about 4.4 million Americans are involved in a traffic accident that requires medical attention. So there's obvious reasons why you might wanna ensure your car and your health, but that also doesn't even touch on the cost that you have to take off work.

You might need to rent a car. You might have litigation expenses. So in my opinion, and I think almost everyone's, car insurance is a must-have. But before I talk about ways to save, let's do a brief run-through of the major components of auto coverage, because even after doing this multiple times, I still come back to it.

I wanna make sure I understand it every year. So let's start with liability. There's usually two components of it. There's bodily injury and property damage, the first being if you injure a person, and the second being if you cause damage to a car or something else. So that's one thing in many states, if not all, it's required, and you absolutely need it.

There's also uninsured, underinsured motorists, which is if you have an accident with someone who doesn't actually have enough coverage for your car or for any injuries that are caused to you, the limits on what you need to have in a lot of states and what you can get away with for liability are very low.

So for example, in California, the minimum liability insurance requirements are $15,000 for injury or death to one person, 30,000 for injury or death to more than one person, and 5,000 for damage to property. So if you're driving around with a car and it's worth more than $5,000, it's possible that someone could hit your car and only have liability coverage for the property they caused damage to up to $5,000.

So I think uninsured and underinsured motorists is pretty important, especially if you're driving around a car that's worth more than your state minimums. Comprehensive coverage is optional, usually required if you have a loan on the vehicle, but that covers when you're not driving. It covers the vehicle, if it's stolen, if there's a fire, vandalism, someone keys your car, and then there's collision, which is for the value of the car in an accident, regardless of who's at fault, if you hit a car or an object or something like that.

Both of those are usually required if you have a loan because your lender wants to make sure that you can collect the value of the car if it's totaled and you're not gonna be underwater. And in fact, if you have a really high loan value, like 100% of the value of the car, you might actually need a gap insurance coverage just in case the value of the car when it's totaled is less than the amount you owe.

And then last, there's medical payments, which covers you and your passengers and your car's medical costs. And you'll notice if you look at your policy, it's usually not that much. Could be $1,000, $5,000, $10,000. It's usually just to cover the deductibles and the co-pays for your health insurance. There's also a bunch of extra features and stuff that I'll get to, but I'm gonna talk broadly about how I think about this.

So the first thing is that you really wanna make sure you're covered adequately. In fact, people seem to have such a problem deciding what adequate is that some insurers, like State Farm, at least in California, won't let you price a policy online. The message I've heard from talking to a State Farm agent is that there were just too many people buying policies that didn't adequately cover them.

And then when they get in an accident, they try to blame the insurance company for letting them have a coverage that was lower than they needed. So how do you actually pick the right coverage? This is gonna be a really personal decision. It's gonna depend on a lot of factors, like your net worth and your comfort with risk.

But I will say on the liability front, you probably wanna make sure that your net worth and even maybe your earning potential is protected because what you don't want is to get in an accident, cause damages to a person or a vehicle, and not have enough coverage such that they can come after you.

So someone could sue you, they could sue you for what you have in your bank account, your investments, your property, any of your assets. And in some states, they can also sue you for your future earnings potential. So I would be making sure that you have all of that covered.

But if that total amount of your net worth is over 250 or $300,000, then I would not actually focus on trying to increase your coverage on your liability for your auto policy. I would actually focus on getting an umbrella policy, and I think it'll be a lot less expensive, and it'll be a lot more broadly applicable.

I'll cover that a little bit later, but just something to keep in the back of your mind. When it comes to comprehensive and collision, it's actually optional. So if you've paid off your car and the car is very inexpensive, it might not make sense to you, but we have a Vespa, and the value of the Vespa is probably under $1,000 at this point.

So for that, I only have liability coverage. I don't have any comprehensive or collision coverage, because I just think at the end of the day, having to make a claim on that Vespa that might impact my rates in the future for hundreds of dollars of loss is probably not worth it.

On the medical payment stuff, I would say just make sure you have enough that you think you can cover the health insurance deductibles for your family or whoever's in the car. And then, like I said, on the uninsured motorist, if you have collision protection, you're kind of gonna be covered in case someone hits your car and isn't covered enough.

So it's not the end of the world. And if you have health insurance, you might be thinking, "Oh, well, at the end of the day, all I'm gonna have to do if I have problems with my health to go to the doctor is cover my co-pays or my deductibles." And most people probably have that much insurance.

But what if you can't work? What if you have to take a bunch of time off work? What if you have a permanent injury? Your health insurance might cover the treatment, but it won't go beyond that. And adding this to your policy is not that expensive. So for our policy, adding the exact same coverage for uninsured, underinsured motorists as we have for our own liability coverage is less than 5% of the cost of the policy.

So for me, it was an easy thing to add on. I think there's two states that require it, but in general, it's an optional policy. So that's the coverages. But when it comes to the prices, it's kind of crazy. When I was looking at homeowners, it was like 10 to 20% variability across different carriers.

But when it came to auto, I remember as soon as we first got our Tesla, the difference between GEICO and State Farm was like 2X the price. And even right now, when I'm looking at insuring both of our cars, for me, my wife, the au pair, the quotes ranged from $3,000 to $6,000 a year for comparable coverage for everything.

So it's really important when you're doing this to also make sure you're comparing apples to apples. For the most part, the policies are about the same. There are some carriers where the liability limit is 300, 500 versus 250, 500. But for the most part, it's pretty easy to get apples to apples.

There are a few places like rental car coverage and a few extra optional features that you might not be able to have. So for me, when I'm comparing, I turn those features off. I make note that those carriers have it. So I might decide to go with a different carrier because they have some extra features, but I wanna make sure I'm comparing price fairly.

So the deductibles are for your comprehensive and your collision coverage. So assuming you have that, you get to decide how much you wanna have to put out of pocket before your insurance kicks in. So a big factor of this is how much emergency savings you have set aside and how willing you are to actually make a claim.

For the most part, when you're making a claim on your auto insurance, you can probably expect that your rates, if they don't rise right away, might rise at the change of the next renewal. And so you ask yourself, for a while I had a $250 deductible and then our window got broken into and it was gonna cost $500 to replace the window.

And I thought, okay, well, if I pay out of pocket, I'm gonna spend $500. But if I file a claim, I'm gonna spend $250 for the deductible and the insurance company will cover the other 250. But now I have a claim on my insurance history and I've heard very mixed feedback on whether a comprehensive claim like that will affect your rates or not, or how big of an effect it had.

But for me, I ended up not making the claim because I didn't want the insurance rates to go up because even a five, 10% change in your insurance rates might be more, especially over a handful of years, than the actual savings you'd have right now. So for us, we actually raised our deductibles to all be $1,000, which yes, it means that if we're in an accident, if we need to repair the car, the first $1,000 is coming out of our pockets, but it brought the policy costs down a few hundred dollars a year, which means if we're not having an accident every couple of years, we're actually gonna save money in the long run.

And fortunately, I'm knocking on the wood of my desk, we have not had an accident and we have not had to make a claim for almost probably 10 years. So given that, it actually has been a good savings for us. Another really important thing to track when you're trying to figure out how to save, especially in light of the post-pandemic world where a lot of us can work from home, is changing your mileage that you report on your policies.

So if you don't drive as much as the average person, which is like 10 to 12,000 miles a year, you could actually tell your insurance company, please price this number of miles a year. And some insurance companies offer a device that tracks that, some just require that you report your odometer reading every year.

But when we changed ours, which we don't drive a lot, we're at 3,500 miles for one car, 5,000 for another, the policy prices went way, way down. So make sure that if you're not driving a lot, you can actually track this. If you don't know where you're at, one tip here, if you have any service records for your vehicle, you can go back and look at them and they usually put in your odometer reading when you go in for service.

So you should be able to go back and look, oh, if two years ago, your odometer read something, now two years later, it's only 5,000 miles more, then you're only driving the car 2,500 miles a year. And you could save a lot of money if your policy is priced at you driving 12,000 miles a year.

Another way to save if you have the cashflow is that for a lot of carriers paying monthly comes with a little bit of an extra fee. So if you pay upfront in full, you might save that. And also when it comes to payments, some carriers give you a discount if you sign up for auto pay.

So when I was talking with USAA, they told me depending on the state you live in, you can get up to 5% off your policy if you enroll in automatic payments and they don't charge a fee for doing things monthly. So it was like a double win, except they said it's not eligible in California, but it's 5% in Florida.

So if you're in Florida, that's a great option. And also if you have a big insurance bill, one great thing is that if you pay in full, you can time that really nicely with a credit card signup bonus that you need to hit a minimum spend right away. So that's something.

In some states also, not California, but insurance companies charge less if you have good credit, or if you take a driving course or different things depending on your record. So when you're going through your policy, ask your insurance agent or ask people, are there things that I can do?

Is this being factored in? If your credit was being factored in, then it might be worth spending time there. If taking a driving course can drop your limits, it might be worth the cost depending on how much that costs. There are also discounts if you have anti-theft devices, tracking devices like OnStar and LoJack and that kind of stuff.

I think it's always worth finding out what that discount would be before you go and install these things. A lot of them come with monthly service fees that might not actually make up for the savings. And then finally, if a student is on your policy, maybe your child, if they have good grades or are enrolled as a full-time student, sometimes you can get deals there.

So that's a lot of the savings and the ways to think about it. I'm gonna talk a little bit about some of the extra coverages that you can find on these policies and just how I've thought about them. So one is ride share coverage. If you're driving for Lyft or Uber, you absolutely should have this to make sure you're covered.

Rental car coverage. This is one where you've got to decide how important is it that I have another car? If you have three cars and one of them's in the shop and you're not gonna need to borrow a car, then it's probably not worth paying for this. But if you have a big family and you only have one car that fits all of you, it might be worth having enough coverage for a rental car on that specific car so that you can rent a comparable car and be able to go places without needing to drive two vehicles.

Towing is another one. So if you already have AAA, maybe you don't need to be paying your car insurance carrier also for towing coverage and you might be able to waive that. But if you don't, I know having been in a situation where we have a flat tire and we needed to call a tow truck and we actually didn't have the coverage, it was quite frustrating.

One simple trick here is I think most insurance companies, even USA has a couple day waiting period, but I believe that Lyft Pink, which is like the subscription service that sits on top of Lyft, comes with towing coverage and can be activated immediately. So if you're in a bind and you don't have any towing coverage, maybe activate Lyft Pink and schedule a tow.

There's another coverage that so far I've only seen with USAA called car replacement assistance, which basically says that if your car is totaled, they'll just give you an extra 20% on whatever the value of the car is. And that can help with getting a new car that's maybe a little more expensive because your car's depreciated because it's obviously been driven.

It could help you upgrade your car. It could help if there's a gap in the coverage and how much you owe and you didn't have gap insurance. It's not the cheapest coverage, can be anywhere from 10, 20 to $100 or more every six months. But my sister-in-law actually got in an accident that someone else caused, totaled her car in the middle of the pandemic when cars were really, really expensive.

And without that extra 20%, she wouldn't have even been able to replace her car with a used car that was comparable. So she was so excited that they had that coverage because it was what enabled them to replace their car and not have to go out of pocket for that cost.

Then as far as what might vary between different carriers and things you might wanna ask about, some of the higher value carriers will do things like only pay for the cost to repair at any facility at their rates. So in some states, I know California is one of them, you can choose where you repair your vehicle.

The insurance company can't tell you where you have to go, but they don't have to pay the rates of every carrier, they have to pay fair rates. There are some carriers that will pay for the rates even at those high cost facilities. There are some carriers that either have add-ons or by default always pay for original manufacturer OEM parts and they don't require you to consider paying for cheaper parts.

I know in a lot of cases, if they will only pay for aftermarket parts, you can request them to pay for OEM parts or you can pay the difference. There are some carriers that will replace damaged car seats, but it's not standard in a lot of policies. And so if you get in an accident and you had two $300 car seats, you're out that $600.

And then there are some carriers like Chubb and Pure, which I'll talk about a little later, that are much more kind of high net worth premium carriers that just have really big coverages for things like uninsured motorists. I think Chubb goes up to $10 million. So if you were to get an accident that prevented you from working in any capacity, the state disability policies that you might have or even a short-term disability policy is probably not gonna cover the fact that you can't work for the rest of your life.

And if someone's policy that gets into an accident with you has no coverage and your uninsured motorist that you have only goes to 100,000, then that's the max you're gonna get. But in Chubb's case, they have a $10 million policy there. So that's something that I think it comes at an extremely high cost, which I'll talk about.

But I just wanna go over some of the things that differ between policies. I'm not gonna go into all the deals if you're trying to rent a car, how to save money. But if you go back and listen to episode 66 with Jonathan Weinberg from Auto Slash, we went through every single rental car hack you could imagine.

So if you need to rent a car after getting an accident or anything like that, definitely listen to that and see if you can save some money, unless your insurance company is gonna cover it all, in which case it's not a priority to save them money. One other thing I will mention though, is if you're listening to this and you don't have a car, it is worth considering getting a non-owner liability policy if you do drive regularly or rent cars regularly.

That one allows you to decline the rental car coverage, which can be expensive, because if you don't have your own auto policy, you definitely wanna make sure that when you're driving a rental car, you have liability coverage, and you have liability coverage that matches your net worth. Because some of those default policies that are included for liability at a rental car agency might be $25,000.

And that's fine if you have a $10,000 net worth, but it's definitely not fine if you have a million dollar net worth. So if you don't have a car, so you don't have auto insurance, but you do drive somewhat regularly or rent cars from time to time, definitely look into non-owner policies for liability coverage.

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So generally, homeowner's insurance covers the destruction and damage to your home, the loss or the theft of possessions, personal liability if something were to happen to someone on your property, or if you need to be out of your home, your ability to stay somewhere else while your home's unable to be lived in.

I don't think there's really a question of whether or not you should have homeowner's insurance or renter's insurance, you should. Most mortgage lenders require it, so it's not even an option. But I will remind people that depending on where you live, natural disasters like floods, hurricanes, earthquakes are often excluded from a policy and you might need a separate policy.

Renter's insurance is very similar to homeowner's insurance. It protects your property, offers liability coverage, damage to the goods you have, covers the cost of another place if you can't live in your current place. But damage to the building is actually still the responsibility of the landlord and covered by their insurance policy.

So renter's insurance is less expensive because the big bulk of that policy is actually gonna be held by your landlord. So the main coverages you'll have in a policy like this, and very nicely, they have letter labels, so it's A through E, as I'm pulling up one of the quotes I have.

So coverage A is your kind of main dwelling and attached structures. That covers your house, if your garage is attached, if you have decks, that's the main coverage thing. That's the number that it's gonna cost to replace your home. And that's only on homeowners. Then there's a coverage B, which is other structures.

So that's if you have a detached garage or a shed or any other buildings on your property. Those two, A and B, are ones that are the responsibility of the homeowner. The rest of these coverages, while they might not have this letter on a renter's policy, you have them on renter's policies as well.

Coverage C is for your personal property. That's your furniture, your clothing, anything in the house. Coverage D is loss of use. That's if you can't be in your home and you need to rent a home or stay at a hotel. Coverage E is liability. That's if something were to happen to someone on the property and that covers your liability.

And then coverage F, like auto, is medical payments. That covers the cost of the co-pays or the deductibles or any medical issues. And there's two interesting things. One, your deductible doesn't usually apply here for medical payment coverage. But also, if you're able to help someone who got injured on your property pay for all of their deductibles or their co-pays, you might actually prevent them from suing you for any monetary compensation.

And so that medical payments coverage might prevent you from needing to take a liability claim, which even if your insurance policy will cover that liability claim, it's certainly gonna be better in the long run for your rates to not have to tap into that liability coverage and just focus on that medical payments coverage, especially because the deductible also won't apply.

When I was thinking about this, the most important thing is to have enough coverage. One thing that we realized in San Francisco a handful of years ago is that our home appreciated a lot faster than we had realized, which was a great thing to have happen. But when that happened, the rebuilding costs to build that home went up and our policy wasn't actually covered enough.

So I definitely think you wanna keep an eye on the value of your home, the cost to replace it, rebuilding costs, and make sure you adjust your policies as needed. A lot of policies have something called extended reconstruction, which basically says, oh, if at the time that something happens, costs have gone up, it will cover the difference.

So that's definitely something that I would add because you never know what the circumstances will be like. During COVID, lumber prices were super expensive. So you probably would have needed more coverage than you did the year before. And so similarly, as we kind of grew up in life and we upgraded from Ikea furniture to more expensive furniture, you'd wanna make sure you have enough coverage on your personal property as well.

So I just like to take a quick evaluation every year of home values, what's gone up, maybe ask a real estate agent what empty lots or teardowns are going for. And if you could say, okay, well, I live on a lot this size. If I could buy a teardown for this much and I could sell my home for this much, that delta is probably what it's gonna cost to build something nice.

You could also just ask around. People often know the cost to build on a per square foot basis. Or a lot of the insurance carriers have these estimators. I found that every time I talked to a carrier, their estimator came in about 20% lower than when I talked to someone who knew about the cost to build in the area.

The good news is that as long as you let the carrier decide what they think you need to be covered by. So for example, if your carrier says you need to have $700,000 of coverage on the house, and you think, well, it might be more like 800, as long as they're signed off on the 700 and that's the cost, the extended reconstruction might kick in if they're wrong.

That said, personally, I just wanna make sure that I am as close to covered as possible and that that extended reconstruction only kicks in if there's actually incremental costs that were unplanned. So I tried to get as much coverage and not try to save here by using their low estimates, but I would definitely make sure you have that extended reconstruction coverage if the carrier allows it, or maybe look for a carrier that does.

And some of the high value carriers like Chubb and Pure, which I'll get to, might even have something that goes beyond that. So this extended reconstruction thing's interesting because you can add 20%, you can add 50%, some carriers let you add 100%, meaning if that coverage A amount for your home is $700,000, they'll cover you up to 1.4 million to rebuild the home, but there are some carriers that offer guaranteed replacement value.

So it's like, it goes beyond whatever percent is, it's just, we're gonna pay to do that. And then even more than that, some carriers, and it's really only the high value ones, so unfortunately, it's not something that I think I'm gonna take advantage of right now, but they'll give you an option to just take a cash payout, whereas most carriers will just reimburse you along the way for rebuilding the home.

So if you don't wanna go through the process of rebuilding your home, some of those high value carriers like Pure and Chubb and Cincinnati will offer you just this one time, here's the cash payout, you can take this and sell your lot and not worry about rebuilding. So when I'm thinking about these coverages, I wouldn't think about dialing back any of the coverages to save money unless you really don't need them.

So a few of the ones that I think you can consider playing around with, but I will point out that many carriers just have a fixed number. So your loss of use might be 10 or 20% of your dwelling coverage. Your other structures might be 10 or 20%. So you don't really get to play with a lot of the dials.

Some carriers, though, will let you. So Lemonade, for example, lets you play with your loss of use and your property coverage. Some carriers say, "Do you want 10 or 20%?" When it comes to a few things, on personal property, you probably have some sense walking around your house that whether you have a bunch of really expensive things or not, whether your kitchen is done with really expensive appliances or not, so you might not need as much personal property coverage as is default.

So you could dial that back if you don't think you need it. On loss of use, if you happen to have two homes or you have family that lives nearby, plenty of space for you, you might consider not having as much loss of use coverage. But if you don't, you might wanna consider having extra just so that you aren't forced to go live too far away.

Some carriers even guarantee that they'll find you a place comparable in your school district, while others might just give you a budget and you have one year to spend it, which if you know anyone who's built a home, one year might not even be enough. Some of the other extras, earthquake is one.

I think it's a really personal decision because it's very expensive in the Bay Area. Your earthquake coverage might actually cost as much or potentially more than your homeowner's coverage. Then there's coverage for things like floods are the same or hurricanes, so look into those. Maybe ask some friends how they've thought about it who live in the area you live in.

A lot of other small coverages that you need to consider, whether you need jewelry coverage, both on the policy, sometimes you can increase the amount that will be covered. Sometimes it might say we only cover jewelry up to $500, but you can add something on that will cover any items up to 1,000 or 2,000 or 5,000.

If you have something that costs 10,000, 50,000, you probably wanna get a separate policy and I'll talk about that. There's water backup coverage in case your sump pump fails or there's water coming through the sewers into your home, identity theft, worker's comp, if you have someone living or working in your home, like an au pair, those are all things.

There are some carriers that offer what's called a large loss deductible waiver, which basically means if there is a large loss, they usually have a limit. If there was a loss over $500,000 or over $100,000, they'll waive your deductible. That's something interesting. And then that thing I mentioned earlier, guaranteed replacement cost.

If it's offered, would be great. They're just gonna guarantee they'll replace your home. You don't have to worry about changing the amounts or having enough extended reconstruction. So when it comes to picking these coverages, gonna be a unique question, but when it comes to ways to save, I think there are a few things.

So one, similar to what I was talking about with auto is think about your deductibles. For us, I think on the homeowner's policy, we really want this for like major catastrophic issues. So we're comfortable with a higher deductible, knowing that if something small were to happen, we're just gonna have to pay out of pocket.

And that's what our emergency fund is for. I don't know what the impact of having a homeowner's claim is when it comes to rates, but I know that as we were shopping around for homeowners right now, every single carrier asked, have you had a claim in the last three years?

Have you had a claim in the last three years? So I can't imagine that it doesn't have an impact. Also, there are a lot of discounts for homeowners that you wanna look into. Obvious ones that they always ask are about alarms, but especially alarms that report to local fire and police stations or central monitoring, fire sprinklers, security cameras, all those things can reduce your policy by 15, 20%.

But there are also a few extra things to consider. So we have Ring for our alarm system, and they make these smoke alarm listeners. We have Nest Protects around the house for our smoke alarms. And if you put one of these listeners next to your Nest Protect, what you can actually do is turn your Ring monitoring system, that's normally just a burglary alarm in case someone breaks in, but it'll listen for the smoke alarm and report that as well.

And so now you all of a sudden have a fire and smoke central reporting alarm, which qualifies you often for more discounts. They also make a flood and freeze sensor that you can put in that might qualify you for discounts. There are also a handful of organizations that offer discounts.

So when we were looking at travelers, I started searching for travelers discount, and I found that members of PenFed, which is a credit union, get a discount on travelers. It's like an affinity discount. And so I just joined PenFed so that I'd be eligible for the travelers discount. We didn't end up going with travelers, but it was free to join PenFed, and I wanted to see what the discounted rate would be.

There are also some carriers like USAA that are only available to specific people. I wouldn't say you necessarily save money, though in our case for home, USAA was definitely the best rate. For auto, it was a little bit higher, but by having a father who was in the military, I was eligible and you're required to have some relationship to the military like that to be eligible.

But now that I'm eligible, so will my children, et cetera. So if anyone in your family is in the military or maybe was a grandparent that's still alive, if they join, then your parent can join and then you can join. So definitely something worth looking into if that's a situation you're in.

And then the other big way to save is to just comparison shop like I've talked about before. Unfortunately, there's no great perfect comparison site. I've looked at a lot of the sites that say, "Oh, we'll shop across all the carriers." They usually only shop across some of the carriers.

So I had to go through and kind of do it manually and it was a lot of work. And I actually am wondering whether this would have been a great virtual assistant task in hindsight, but knowing I was gonna do this episode, I think it was something I wanted to do myself.

But one hack that might save you a little time when you're doing some comparison shopping, they have all these quizzes about your home, the size, the roof material. Some of them get very complicated. I think the one on USAA is like hundreds of questions like what square footage is each bathroom?

Does it have a tub or does it have a shower? Do you have a chandelier? And then some of them just ask five or six questions. But usually at the end of that process, you can just choose the coverage amount as long as it's above what they estimated. So if you want a comparison price, some insurance policies, you could just run through that quiz knowing you're gonna get some of the answers wrong, get to the end, change the coverage to what you want so you can compare policies.

And then once you find the right one, I would definitely make sure that when you actually go to get that policy, you redo it, answering the questions perfectly. But when you're just price shopping and trying to get a quote, you might not need to answer all those questions because you can change the coverage amount at the end.

And then another big one, I'm gonna talk about bundling, but it's definitely something to consider. But I wouldn't always assume it was the best. For a while, we were with Lemonade and it was cheaper even though we didn't bundle with auto for us. But now looking at policies, I think bundling actually is gonna be a better deal.

And then one last thing that isn't really gonna save you money now, but it definitely will in the future. And it came up in episode 35 with Joe Salsihai is to make sure you document everything you have in your home for any potential property claims. So I would walk through with your video on your phone into every room and just make sure that you point out, here's our TV, here's our stereo, here's our couch, here's the person who makes it.

Obviously some of these things like furniture or major purchases, you probably have the receipts for, but I think it would be very, very important to go around and make sure you've documented everything, at least in a video. Go in your closet, here's our clothes, go in your room and everything.

That's something that I would do. Garage, tools, all of that. And I would even consider for really expensive things like a TV or a computer, just write down the model and the serial number somewhere just so you can kind of prove what it is and make sure you get properly reimbursed if something were to happen.

Now, I mentioned earlier that some of the high value things like jewelry aren't covered. And so if you have any expensive jewelry, art, bikes, cameras, you probably need an additional rider on your insurance, often called a personal articles policy. It varies by carrier. Oftentimes the threshold is about $1,000 and the policies aren't that expensive, maybe about 1% of the value of the item.

It's definitely something that if you have an expensive engagement ring or a really nice bike, I would look at covering separately. The policy that we have for Amy's ring is less than $100 a year. And I think it has no deductible. So definitely something worth looking into if you have any of those items.

Previously, we talked about liability and umbrella very briefly. But while your home policy will cover the liability in your home and your auto policy will cover the liability in your car, it might not be enough. For example, if you have $250,000 of liability, that doesn't mean that someone couldn't sue you for a million or 2 million or 5 million.

Now, if you don't have $2 million, it's unlikely that they're gonna try to expect to get 2 million from you. So they're probably not gonna bring a suit like that against you. But if you were in an accident and you caused serious injury or even death to someone, I could see a suit coming for more than 250,000, especially if you have more than that.

And so that's where umbrella or excess liability or personal liability insurance comes in. And it sits on top of your home and auto policies and it covers the liability for as much as you wanna pay for, depending on the carrier. They aren't that expensive. They're usually a few hundred dollars for your first $1 million of coverage and then maybe another 100 or 200 for every 1 million after that.

Definitely check to see. They do require usually that one of your home or auto policies are with that carrier. It's not always the case, but I know GEICO won't write a umbrella policy unless you have auto with them. I know USAA won't write a umbrella policy unless you have auto and home with them.

So definitely worth talking to someone about that. When it comes to how much to have, I think there's a lot of people that will give you different answers. I know some people that cover their net worth in full. I know some people that are comfortable with just a million.

I know some people with a huge net worth that only think five or 10 million is necessary. And so I don't know a lot of people that have more than $10 million of umbrella coverage no matter how much money they have, but because some states allow you to go after someone not just for the money they have and the assets they have, but also their future earnings, it's definitely something that I think many people might not have, but probably should.

Obviously when you're young and early in your career and you don't have a huge net worth, it's not as important, but as you start to save and have assets and have significant earnings potential, definitely worth considering. So that's the four main policies that I've been focused on recently. Let me talk a little bit about how I decided and evaluated carriers and figured out what to do.

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To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com/deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. I'm sure people will come back and say they disagree or they had better experiences with some of these or worse, but in general, when I talked to people and I read through lots of comments on forums and Reddit and everything, it seemed like all the carriers kind of fell into three buckets.

There were your standard carriers, your GEICO, your Progressive, your State Farm. There were carriers that were still kind of mainstream, but people categorized as better or more premium. Travelers came up here, Safeco, Amica, USAA, and then there were actually the premium insurers. So these are carriers not just that will write coverage beyond what traditional covers do, but just have a much more high-end experience.

Two of the bigger ones are Pure and Chubb, but other ones are Cincinnati, AIG, Nationwide Private Client, Hartford, et cetera. One thing to note is that a lot of them have minimums. So even if you had a home only worth a million dollars, some of them might write the limits to 3 million.

So it's never gonna be a reasonable price. When I looked at the premium insurers, it was gonna be almost 30, 40% more to use any of them. And while I talked earlier about some of the things you get from those expensive, nice policies like guaranteed replacement or better, faster claims, use any repair shop, OEM parts, paying 30, 40% more just wasn't worth it for me.

Also to do some research for this episode, I went and paid for Consumer Reports and I wanted to look at their data. When you look at home and auto, the top three carriers on both are the same. It's USAA, Amica, and NJM. And NJM, which is New Jersey Manufacturers, they definitely stood out as the top three rated on all different aspects.

But a few of the ones that were below those top three that stood out a little bit on both auto and home were Chubb, Cincinnati, Auto Owners, Erie, and Country Financial. I looked at Chubb and Cincinnati and they were too expensive. I looked at a few of the others.

Erie, for example, doesn't operate in California, but that's just save you some time from Consumer Reports. That doesn't mean that other carriers aren't great. I've heard lots of good things about Pure. I've actually heard lots of good things about Travelers, though Consumer Reports didn't think they were great. But I figured I'd just share, save you some time, or save you the $39 a year to get access to those ratings.

That's a lot of the carriers, but how do you actually go about doing this? And I wish that I could tell you it was easier, but some of these carriers, a lot of this kind of standard Geico, progressive, State Farm, you have to go direct to them and they don't work with brokers.

And then a lot of the other carriers like Travelers and Safeco and Pure and Chubb, they only work through brokers. So you can't go one place and get access to all of the policies. I did go to a couple brokers. And I will say that, especially in California, I think nationwide, but all the insurers have very specific rates.

So you're gonna get the same rate no matter which broker you work with. And like travel agents, the commissions are kind of baked in. And so I wouldn't worry about, "Oh, I don't wanna pay a broker's fee." 'Cause that's just kind of built into the price and it's not really gonna cost you directly.

I went to a few. If you need a recommendation, I'm happy to send one, but it might vary by state and where you live. And so I'd definitely reach out locally. So what I did was I went online and I tried to do the quotes where I could online 'cause it was way faster.

I focused on carriers that had good reviews and that were easy to get in front of. And then I found a broker who could reach out on my behalf and pull quotes for a few of the other companies. So the match was me doing it for most of the carriers and then working with one broker to look at something like Travelers, Safeco and some of the premium insurers.

While I ultimately didn't even come close to doing something like Pure or Cincinnati or Chubb, I did wanna know what it costs both for the purpose of this episode, to understand the benefits. And a part of me doesn't know how to value that, right? How do I value the fact that I'll be able to send my car to any repair shop if there's an accident?

I'm sure I could do some kind of statistical model of, "Okay, well, what's the likelihood it's gonna happen? And what's the cost of it? And is it worth it?" But when I looked at it and it was gonna be an extra four to $5,000 a year for all our policies and require usually higher deductibles, I kind of took all of the super premium carriers off.

And I'll keep in mind, I might mention carriers that I found to be expensive or not. And then I found plenty of people in forums or on Reddit that said, "That's so crazy. I compared USA to State Farm and State Farm was so much cheaper." And then the other person's like, "That's crazy.

For me, USAA is so much cheaper." It really varies so much state by state, person by person, zip code by zip code, type of car, et cetera. So I wouldn't read too far into me saying that I had a better price at one. I would definitely do your homework.

There are some sites like Policy Genius that are brokers online that can save you the time of having to get on the phone and do a lot of this. I did try to do that, but for some reason, the page where you hit submit never loaded. So it didn't work so well for me.

But I will say that at least in California, the value of bundling made this a much harder decision because I would look at the prices and say, "Wow, State Farm, for example, was really great, but their umbrella policy was twice as expensive. And USAA was really competitive, but their auto was twice as expensive." So I kept going through this and being like, "I just want a cherry pick from each of them," except the cost of the homeowner's policy would go up 20% if you didn't bundle it with auto.

So it was very frustrating experience for me looking at all of these policies and saying, "I have to go with this company. I have to pay more for the auto policy because the savings for bundling makes up for it." I wish that wasn't the case. I wish I could pick and choose, but that's just the way it is.

I actually looked at the total cost for each carrier instead of just policy by policy because that bundled savings ended up being so high on home. In California, best I can understand, there is no bundled savings for auto. So if you find a really great home price that doesn't require bundling, you get a little bit more flexibility, but it can make it hard for certain insurance carriers that don't offer everything.

So for example, someone emailed in and asking why I didn't look at Tesla insurance for my Model 3. And the reality was it was a little bit less expensive. I was reasonably confident, though not 100%, that if I have Tesla insurance, they're at least not gonna make me go to some random repair shop and that they'll actually repair it at a Tesla dealership.

But if I get Tesla insurance, I can't get any bundling discount and it's gonna raise the price of that homeowner's policy by $500 to $1,000 a year, which actually makes any discount from Tesla insurance not worth it. Ultimately, I looked at all the prices. I'm so close to the finish line, but not quite there.

I'm waiting to hear back from one question on travelers. When you live in California, especially with being in proximity to places with wildfires and that kind of stuff, we're fortunately not in those zones, but it does require a lot of our quotes sometimes to go through underwriting to make sure it's all approved.

So the process can be a 24, 48-hour turnaround. Ultimately, I think we'll end up at USAA or Travelers. That's my instinct. But it's gonna be close because GEICO right now is about $1,000 a year cheaper on auto, maybe because we've been there for a while, maybe because they're more generous with an international young driver.

So I think it'll either be USAA or Travelers for home, and then GEICO there or not, depending on whether the GEICO discount is better or worse than the bundling discount. Also, I don't know how to think about the value of having everything in one place. There's like this peace of mind that I wanted going into this process of, ah, it'd just be nice to have one insurance company that I could deal with for everything.

And when it came down to it, it was like, do I wanna pay $800 a year to have that peace of mind? I'm sure if I went back and talked to Dan Martell, he would tell me I'm definitely not valuing my time at all, and that I spent way too much time on this whole project.

But whenever I spend time on this, I feel like I'm getting a lot of enjoyment, I'm getting a lot of satisfaction, but I'm also creating content that hopefully is valuable to a lot of you. So the leverage on my time isn't what I can do from it, but it's the satisfaction of knowing that hopefully lots of you listening are gonna save money or be better insured.

And so I feel good about spending 50 hours on this project, which might only save me $1,000 a year, but hopefully will save tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars across everyone listening. So that is all the major policies that I price regularly that I just recently went through a process of.

I would absolutely love if anyone listening to this has questions, thoughts, feedback, things to share. I'm gonna do a Q&A episode, and I'm gonna share anything anyone here has heard. I know there are one-off situations that can be good or bad. But if you've had a really bad or a really great experience with a carrier, let me know, even if it's just a quick email.

I'll share all the recap learnings that I've gotten from you all in the next episode. So definitely do that, chris@allthehacks.com. You can DM me on social anywhere as well. I also wanna touch on a few other types of insurance. So let's jump into it. Life insurance is one of those important things that I think can have a huge impact on your spouse, your family, your children, even your parents sometimes, should something happen to you.

So its primary goal is to replace the loss of your future income for anyone you leave behind. It can also help cover things like funeral expenses or pay off debt. And I think if you have young kids or anyone who really depends on you and your income to survive, it's really something you should consider.

And when it comes to what kind, this is where it gets very confusing, but I have a very specific point of view. Term life. It's a policy that has a limit for how long it's active, 10, 20, 30 years, for example. If you pass away within that term, your beneficiaries get the face value of the policy, also called a death benefit, and it's usually tax-free.

And if you pass after the term expires or you just stop paying your bills, they get nothing. So if it expires, why would you go with this when there's these other policies that are marketed as amazing savings vehicles that you can earn all this extra money and save compound tax-free permanent life, whole life, universal life.

They all market themselves as offering you a benefit that lasts your whole life and helps you build wealth, but they have complex rules, they have high premiums and high fees, and I think you're almost always better off taking what you save with those lower premiums of a term policy and investing the difference in low-cost index funds yourself instead of trying to bundle together your life insurance and your investment savings.

It's not always easy to find that advice. I think if you look in the right places, you'll get it. I'll link to a couple articles from NerdWallet and The White Coat Investor. The Reddit personal finance group will say the same thing, but it's hard because permanent, whole, and universal life policies have such high commissions that there are so many people that make so much money selling it that it is worth all the marketing, all the conversations, and why it's very easy to find someone that will try to convince you that it's the best.

But in my personal opinion, term life is great, and I think that's what I would focus on. As far as how much to get and for how long, you don't have to get just one policy. So a great hack here is called laddering or layering your policies. So if you wanna be able to replace your income until your children are 18, you're gonna need a lot less money.

Let's say you have one child and they were just born. If you were to pass away today, you might need a lot more than if you were to pass away in 17 years. So you could get a 20-year policy for one amount and a 10-year policy for the other, knowing that by the time your child is 10, you're not gonna need as much life insurance.

That might be different depending on how much money you have saved, whether your spouse works. There's a lot of questions. I'll link to a Policy Genius article that I thought was pretty good about explaining the laddering policy. Another thing that could be laddered, not just your children's ages, but maybe it's when your mortgage gets paid off, or maybe when you're eligible for retirement, or you can tap into your retirement accounts, your 401ks, your IRAs.

That's generally my advice. If you're someone who's listening to this and thinks, "Oh my gosh, I have a permanent life policy or a whole life or a universal life," I don't think it's the end of the world, but I definitely would look into, and I'm not the expert here, what would it cost to cash in on that policy now and switch to term life?

It's something to consider, but I'm not the expert. So I don't know whether that's always a good deal, never a good deal. I can't answer that. But if you don't have a policy now, I would definitely look at term life. I know when I went through this process of shopping for insurance policies, I actually priced out a ton of term life policies.

And part of the reason that I ended up partnering with Fabric on the show as a sponsor is because I looked at their policies, I looked at their reviews, and I looked at their prices, and they were really competitive. They also had an A+ rating, so you can check them out at meetfabric.com/allthehacks.

So that's definitely one option to look at. There's another great site called Term4Sale, the number four dot com, so term4sale.com, which has a bunch of information about various different term policies and prices, et cetera. So that's another place to look. The pricing isn't that variable, but it could be as little as a million dollars of coverage for a dollar a day, and it can go up from there depending on the term length you have.

Funny enough, when I was comparing the cost of term life of a million dollars of coverage to pet insurance, which I'll cover later, it was much cheaper to get term life than pet insurance. So I find that interesting. I also got a great email, thank you for writing in from someone who I don't wanna say their name 'cause I don't wanna call them out, but they work at a big whole life company, and they definitely said, "I do not recommend whole life to the average person." They said, "If you're really wealthy and doing some estate planning tactics, there are some ways that you can use life insurance to avoid taxes and save money in a more tax-efficient manner.

But for basic financial security, they even work at a company that offers this product and would not recommend it." I'm not gonna get into the kind of advanced tactics of using a whole life and universal life in kind of estate planning, high net worth tax savings ways, but for the average person, I think, it's probably not the right policy.

Of course, I'm not an insurance expert. Do your own work, talk to a professional, but just please make sure that professional doesn't make a commission selling you permanent, whole, or universal life. I'll touch briefly, like I said, on pet insurance. I don't have a strong opinion here, but I'll share what I learned.

A lot of people seem to think that if you have an exotic animal that it requires special care, or maybe you have a breed that's really prone to health issues, it could be more important to others. The premiums, depending on what kind of coverage you want, it could be anywhere from 15 to $150 a month, depending on the age of your pet, their breed, the species, their health history.

The older the pet, the higher it is. I've taken the path of self-insurance myself with our dog, who is about eight now. We've had years where we've spent $100 for a vet visit, and we've had years where we spent $1,000 trying to diagnose an issue. In that $1,000 a year, I kind of thought, "Oh gosh, should I have gotten pet insurance?" I reconsidered.

I actually saw a bunch of positive feedback for Lemonade's pet insurance. I priced it out. I thought about it more. Ultimately, we didn't do it. But I think that's because this is such a personal decision that really comes down to how much you'd be willing to spend on your pet for medical treatment.

If that number is, if something were wrong with my dog or my cat, and I would spend anything, $50,000, if that's what it took, pet insurance might be a better fit for you. It's also worth noting that it's not always the kind of reimbursement style insurance. So you might have to pay for your services up front and submit your claims.

And depending on the cost of living where you live, the amount they cover for various things might not be that much. I know I just looked at one of these policies yesterday to brush up, and the amount that they reimbursed for vet visits was definitely less than the vet visit cost in the Bay Area.

So a few things to keep in mind. There are a lot of things you can add on that I would just kind of maybe go look at some vet bills to try to decide whether they make sense. Some policies will cover preventative care. Some policies will cover routine emergency visits versus major surgeries.

It can add up if you get that policy that I looked up for our dog with everything, preventative care, lower deductibles. It was almost $150 a month, which is quite expensive. If you have strong opinions or you've had good or bad experiences on pet insurance on any of these policies, let me know, 'cause I wanna do a recap in the Q&A episode in a week or two covering feedback from you all, because I've learned so much from everyone listening.

So I'd love to get that added to this episode. I'll talk quickly about disability insurance. Anyone at any age can become disabled or unable to work. It could be from illness. It could be from injury. While I don't love this stat, it was the best I found. Before reaching the age of 67, if you're 20 now, there's a one in four chance that you might become disabled at some point.

Now, is that at 66? Is that at 30? It doesn't know. I just think it's something to keep in mind that it might be more common than you think. That doesn't mean you'd be disabled your whole life. I know I had foot surgery once and I was gonna be out for six or eight weeks, and it turns out it was more tax efficient to go on short-term disability than to not, so I did that, but I probably would be included in that statistic.

But there are a lot of circumstances where that situation of disability could have a huge impact on your financial life, and you wanna be covered should you have an accident or a sudden illness that would prevent you from working. So there's two types. There's short-term disability, which is usually up to six months, and long-term disability that can cover you for years or even until you retire, but usually has a waiting period of three to 12 months before it kicks in, where short-term disability would be there.

You might have some coverage through your employers or through a state fund like we have in California. While those funds might say they recover 60 to 80% of your income, they often have weekly or monthly caps that might result in them replacing a much smaller percentage of your income.

So if those policies aren't enough and what you have from work isn't enough and people really depend on your income, it could be worth having a supplemental or even full policy on your own. If you have enough of an emergency fund to cover your full income for three to six months, which I generally recommend, you might be able to self-insure your short-term disability needs, or at least self-insure the difference between the coverage you have and your full income, whether that's from work or from the state.

But unless you're financially independent, you probably won't be able to self-insure against the chance that you become disabled for a really long time. So if you don't have a policy through work, definitely look into whether this might be a good option for you. Look into what your state and your work offers and try to look at what you would need to kind of be comfortable until retirement, taking into account your spouse's income and all that.

I did some research last year for my newsletter and a Guardian and MassMutual came up as two top providers for long-term disability, but I don't have any experience with either. It's also worth pointing out there is a social security disability insurance that comes from all the social security tax you pay from your paycheck each month.

You do have to have paid into these services for a certain amount of time to use them, but usually that's 40 credits, which you get each quarter. So it's about 10 years of employment. You can always go to the social security website and see how many credits you've earned.

But I will say that the maximum benefit you can receive is kind of in the three to $4,000 range per month. So depending on where you live, that might not be enough to cover your life, but you could also factor in whether you'd be willing to move or what kind of changes you'd be able to make in a situation like this.

So that's something to think about. Last, I'll touch on travel insurance. In the past few years, airlines have been pushing travel insurance so hard that I feel like I've gotten lots of questions. And every time you check out from a website buying an airline ticket, it's like, "Do you want the travel insurance?

"Do you want the travel insurance?" Most of those travel insurances cover things like delayed lost bags, trips delays, cancellations, interruptions, that kind of stuff, maybe medical evacuation, rental car damage. Almost all of those are things that you get from a great travel credit card. So I'll link to an example of the guide to benefits for the Chase Sapphire Reserve, but you should definitely look at your travel card and see what kind of benefits those include.

I don't think I've done a full episode. Maybe I should. Let me know if you want one on a guide to all the benefits. I know I've written a newsletter about it. I'll link to it in the show notes, but just walking through all the credit card benefits you might have, whether they need to be supplemented or whether they're enough, how to use them, et cetera.

That's kind of how I think about a lot of the policies that are being sold as you're checking out from an airline. I've never accepted those policies, but policies worth considering are if your health insurance doesn't cover you when you're traveling abroad, definitely look at a policy that covers medical treatment abroad.

If you're worried about getting stuck abroad with medical situations and you want something that will cover a flight back, you can get medical evacuation insurance. The policy I have gotten and I did get during the pandemic was a policy from Trawick. They had this policy called Safe Travels Voyager.

I've purchased it a few times. It covers more than you will get if you have a circumstance that your credit card would cover. Things like if you need to quarantine somewhere, it'll cover your hotel. If you need to get back to the US, it'll often cover you. But if you really wanna get back to the US and you want like no questions asked, get me home immediately, there's a company called Kovac Global that is pretty expensive, somewhere on the order of like $600 per person for a trip, but they will charter you a private flight and get you home even if it's just testing positive for COVID.

So that's something to consider. And then if you're doing a bunch of adventure activities, a lot of basic travel insurance policies, maybe even your health insurance policy might not cover you. In years past, I've used a company called World Nomads to cover those activities. I haven't done it recently, I think probably 'cause I haven't been doing as much rock climbing on our travels.

And then last, if you're going on any kind of trip that's really expensive, I had a friend that went on a cruise to the Galapagos and their connecting flights made it such that they missed their flight. It was not a great circumstance. So if you're doing anything where it's a very expensive endeavor, like a Galapagos cruise, I would definitely double check that you have something to protect you in case your flight gets canceled or delayed and you can't make the boat, or something happens, you get sick, whether that's your credit card policy or another policy, you'd really not wanna miss the departure of a very expensive trip.

So that's all the policies I wanted to cover for this episode. I know that's a lot of information. Maybe I'll put together a recap newsletter. I know I've done two in the past that I'll link to in the show notes that had a good amount of this information, but I really hope it was helpful.

I'll just recap some of these tips. So definitely shop around, definitely read through the policy terms and understand them. Definitely consider whether it makes sense to up your deductibles. That is something that I think I've lowered a lot of my insurance costs by getting more comfortable with just setting aside some money in an emergency fund instead of having to rely on a low deductible, and definitely document everything in your house just in case.

And finally, like I said, I hope we never have any of these issues. I hope you don't have a car accident or a flooded basement, but realistically these things happen. So I hope that this episode was helpful. I hope that you picked up a lot of tips. I hope that you can use it to protect yourself adequately and save some money.

Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, send it to a friend. The highest praise that you could give me for any of the work I'm doing is to help bring new people to the podcast. So if you know someone that wants to save money or adequately insure themselves, send them this episode, tell them to have a listen, tell them to reach out if they have questions.

I would love to be helpful and find ways to help you all save more and be better insured. So that's it. Thank you for listening. I will see you next week. (upbeat music) (whooshing)