{"id":2282,"date":"2010-11-18T16:19:28","date_gmt":"2010-11-18T21:19:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/?p=2282"},"modified":"2010-11-18T16:39:30","modified_gmt":"2010-11-18T21:39:30","slug":"in-which-i-rant-some-more-about-flood-insurance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/in-which-i-rant-some-more-about-flood-insurance\/","title":{"rendered":"In Which I Rant Some More About Flood Insurance"},"content":{"rendered":"

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. <\/em><\/p>\n

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<\/em> as our homeowner’s insurance does. And only covers the cost of our house. And not the stuff inside it.<\/p>\n

Did I mention that we’re required<\/em> to get this shitty insurance?<\/p>\n

Did I mention that FEMA made the determination that we need to have flood insurance?<\/p>\n

Can we all remember what a fantastic job they do? For example: New Orleans, Ninth Ward of.<\/p>\n

I say…. Fuck FEMA. Fuck FEMA in their big, stupid fucking faces.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Did I mention that we pay twice as much in flood \u00a0insurance as we do for homeowners insurance on a three story house<\/em>?!? Flood insurance that has a five thousand dollar deductible<\/em>?!?<\/p>\n

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 <\/a>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.<\/p>\n

(Insert comment here about how I warned Kristian about the perils of leaving a bank that promises to never resell your mortgage.)<\/p>\n

(This is why everyone should always listen to me.)<\/p>\n

(Because I was right.)<\/p>\n

(Once<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I’m telling you, this shit is a racket.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I also know that I’m lucky to have health insurance. But you can’t make me enjoy my yearly pap smears.<\/p>\n

(Was that too gross?)<\/p>\n

(Probably.)<\/p>\n

(But I’m leaving it in, because I’m a terrible person.)<\/p>\n

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<\/em> flood insurance, they’d find some way to screw us out of collecting. Because that is the way of flood insurance.<\/p>\n

A big, fat, fucking scam.<\/p>\n

(Tell us how you really feel Hope…)<\/p>\n

Our next house is going to be on top of a mountain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,29,34,31,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grumble","category-house-stuff","category-kristian","category-nablopomo","category-random"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5yggS-AO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2282"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2285,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2282\/revisions\/2285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}