This post uses quite a bit of “adult” language. Feel free to close it down now if you are morally opposed to F-Bombs. Or, possibly, if you’re my mother.
I think I’ve mentioned a few times here what a racket flood insurance is. A couple feet of our house touches a 100 year flood plain, so we’re required to get flood insurance on the whole enchilada. Insurance that costs twice as much a year as our homeowner’s insurance does. And only covers the cost of our house. And not the stuff inside it.
Did I mention that we’re required to get this shitty insurance?
Did I mention that FEMA made the determination that we need to have flood insurance?
Can we all remember what a fantastic job they do? For example: New Orleans, Ninth Ward of.
I say…. Fuck FEMA. Fuck FEMA in their big, stupid fucking faces.
Our house is at the highest point on a relatively flat street, miles from the ocean. There’s an underwater stream at the end of the block and apparently this is a big, giant OMGXBOXHUGE danger to our poor little domicile. The 100 year flood plain touches about 4 square feet of our house. Seriously, you look at the map of the flood plain on our street and there’s this tiny little dot on our property and that’s the spot that is completely and utterly screwing us over.
Did I mention that we pay twice as much in flood insurance as we do for homeowners insurance on a three story house?!? Flood insurance that has a five thousand dollar deductible?!?
Kristian and I were all excited when we refinanced our house. We’d paid off enough of the principal that we could actually drop our flood insurance down. Most lenders only require you to have enough coverage to cover the balance of their loan. They’re just covering their own asses, they don’t particularly care if you end up living in a Quonset hut when it’s all said and done. “It” of course meaning the 8th sign of the apocalypse, namely our house flooding. We dropped our coverage down to our loan amount and all was relatively well with the world. Until our loan got sold to Chase.
(Insert comment here about how I warned Kristian about the perils of leaving a bank that promises to never resell your mortgage.)
(This is why everyone should always listen to me.)
(Because I was right.)
(Once.)
Chase apparently requires your flood insurance coverage to be at least 80% of your homeowners insurance. And we, my friends, are overinsured. Well, we’re correctly insured, with replacement value and blah blah blah we wouldn’t want to be homeless blah blah insurance makes me go cross-eyed blah blah blah. The long and the short of it is, we have a lot of regular insurance on our house. Which means that our flood insurance needs to go up. Which means that we need to pay the flood insurance overlords insurers more money. Namely, we need insurance on the max value of the policy. In order to get back to insurance on the principal of the loan, we’d need to drop our regular insurance to a level where we’d be dangerously underinsured.
I’m telling you, this shit is a racket.
I know that we’re lucky to own our own home. I know that we’re lucky to have bought in 2008 and not in 2006. I know that we’re lucky not to be (pardon the pun) underwater on our house. I know that we’re lucky to both have steady jobs with good salaries.
I also know that I’m lucky to have health insurance. But you can’t make me enjoy my yearly pap smears.
(Was that too gross?)
(Probably.)
(But I’m leaving it in, because I’m a terrible person.)
It just seems like, no matter what we do, something new related to flood insurance is going to come up and cause a big hassle and cost us a lot of money. And there’s nothing that we can do about it, because it’s federally mandated. Our only options are to move or to pay off our loan balance in the full. The first of those is undesirable. The second of those is unpossible (Ralph Wiggum reference, FTW). The worst of it? If we ever actually needed flood insurance, they’d find some way to screw us out of collecting. Because that is the way of flood insurance.
A big, fat, fucking scam.
(Tell us how you really feel Hope…)
Our next house is going to be on top of a mountain.
I want an enchilada.
Me too!
That sucks. That’s something I’m not looking forward to when we finally buy a house. 🙁
I reckon mountains have equivalent altitude/avalanche/mountain goat attack insurance rackets as well. You are right -insurance really is a disgusting scam.
Mountain goat insurance would be kindof awesome… except it would be seriously expensive.
I hate insurance, the whole paying for something on the off chance that you need it thing. I was almost happy to see Olivia’s hospital bill cause I was like “haha bitches, I’m finally getting something for those premiums!”
Can you sell those 4 square feet to a neighbor? If I understand you correctly it’s the corner of your lot, right? It might have outrageously high transaction costs, but I imagine selling those 4 square feet for $1 to the adjacent neighbor could actually end up cheaper for you in the long run.
It’s actually part of our house as well. So, we’d have to hack out part of our basement. Probably not so structurally sound!
Kristian is talking about getting someone to resurvey for us. It’s $$$, but if it works it would save us $$$$$ in the long run. And our sanity!
I’m almost at the point where I wouldn’t mind our basement flooding. Oh wait, our insurance doesn’t cover any of our possessions. Just the house. :p
We had no idea about flood insurance, or we would have looked it up. We’re in whatever zone it is that means that you’re the most likely to flood. Which means that a) it’s required and 2) it’s incredibly expensive. If we’d known, we would have thought twice about our house.
It’s pretty easy to look up if you’re in a flood zone and what type it is. With a little research, you can avoid our fate!
i don’t understand how they can sell your mortgage out from under you and require *you* to change something after the fact. it just doesn’t make any sense to me. you signed a contract with your bank.. and anyone buying it should look at those contract conditions and not buy it if they don’t like the conditions.. why is the onus on you to make the new owner happy?!
That’s a good point, Nancy. We should look into that!
Would you believe I am NOT in a flood zone and the bank added it to my mortgage?? I have send paper work that Fema advised me to send them, proving that I am not in a flood zone. Turns out the company that sets up the insurance racket for the bank has the wrong lot number and I have sent them the correct one, according to my deed etc. Not accepting it. Have been in my house for forty years and have never had this problem. It is apparently unsolvable and here I am charged for over $2,400 per year.
Time for an attorney??
well this is my prefrence(bad spelling)well considering the fact that i never wanna get married and never wanna have kids cuz that alone is to much work and huge HUGE COST not to mention that if you get a wife shell bug the shit out of you to buy a house with nice furniture and all of those costly things that an average middle class american wants as FOR MEEE i have everything i ever could want cuz i forced my parents to spoil me rotten cuz im a bad person soo my point is that i only need to worry about renting thats right RENTING!!! A studio apartment PUT ALL OF MY FAVORITE SHIT IN THAT APARTMENT as for food water and clothing i got enough clothing soooo ill just worry about groceries and utillities and to cook the shit ill get a plugin portible grill stove thinggy and use plastic utencels and paper plates and ill survive on two part time
jobs that how a single man should live and screw around here and there at some places as for insurence i got my health bullshit insurnce and dentil free from my jobs no need for home owners scam crap or flood crap let the landlord take care of that shit
and the gov can suck it
I just got a bill for over 5K for flood insurance. Friggin’ greedy racketeers. I own mortgage free so frig ’em.
It’s 5 years later. Are you still paying for flood insurance? We got screwed back in 2008 when the decided to redraw the lines and it goes right through my house. I am trying to sell the house now and it is scaring all buyers away. Such bullshit.
We are. 🙁
We did get a better deal by doing some shopping and dropping our coverage down to what we owe on our mortgage. I don’t think we can ever move!
I know this is an old post but i just got quoted at 3100 a year!!!!!!!!!! WHAT IN THE LIVING FUCK!!!!!!!!! And that covers none of my belongings as well as a 8000$ deductible…..fml i need to talk to someone about this. 30yr morgage equates to around 90+ thousand dollars….. That’s almost half my house cost. Fema eat a big fat dick and choke on it.
I ran across this conversation and just had to join in even though I am a few years late to the party. (For the record and perspective on the numbers that follow, I paid $42,000 for this house in 2004.) When I refinanced my house in 2008 all of the sudden I was required to have flood insurance by the new lender. I thought ok, its about five hundred bucks a year, no big deal. Well, FEMA being the lovely organization that they are, raises the cost every single year without fail. And I love that they give you the option to increase an additional 10% above and beyond their required annual increase. And if you don’t call your lender and specify you want to pay the lower rate they automatically pay the extra 10%. Then your bill the next year is based off that inflated rate. It is a never ending kick to the face, year after year. However, when I got my bill in 2016, now up from $500 in 2008 to almost $2000 per year, I got pissed and started looking in to everything. Long story short, I, at my own expense of $500, had an elevation survey done on the house and low and behold I was never in a fucking flood zone to begin with. My house has been above elevation the whole time. Meanwhile, I figure FEMA sucked about $6K-$7K out of me over 8 years. So finally after proving to FEMA, my lender and God himself that I wasn’t in a flood zone, I have now been able to cancel the policy. But not before paying one more non refundable fee of $250 for the 1 month I had flood insurance on my most recent policy. To say this is a racket is an understatement. It is a gift from our government to the banks. They remove the burden and the risk to lenders by putting the responsibility squarely on the homeowner. What a world we live in. And a big Fuck You to FEMA from me, I’m so thankful to be out of their system.
Fucking bullShit flood insurance.
Hope, I feel your pain. Another victim here of the Flood Insurance scam. We refinanced in 2011 and suddenly got caught in this AE flood zone that I didn’t know existed. Latest premium (tax) $4000. Just got turned down by FEMA for a change of designation because our deck footings are below Base Elevation. Total bullshit. It kills me to pay this extortion money. I have friends that live at the beach, got totally flooded during Sandy, and their premium is $700. It’s all bullshit.