What is an umbrella insurance policy?

An umbrella policy is not like a different kind of insurance plan, but simply a liability policy that stretches out over the limits of your existing home insurance or auto insurance policy. And like an umbrella protects its carrier from the coming rainfall, an umbrella insurance policy protects policyholders from the claims of individuals that exceed the limits of their underlying home insurance or auto insurance policies. You don’t need a separate umbrella insurance policy for both home and auto coverage – one umbrella policy extends protection for claims under each policy.

How does it work?

Having a pool can be a lot of fun, but it can also bring a lot of liability to a home owner’s doorstep. If one of your friends or neighbors is visiting your home and is injured while swimming in or walking around your pool, it could result in a very large claim against your home insurance policy (depending on the nature and extent of the damages suffered). For the sake of this example, let’s say that you have a home insurance policy with limits of $250,000. Your children’s friends come over one afternoon to enjoy the pool and one of them slips and falls in, resulting in a neck injury and partial temporary disability that creates a need for several years’ worth of physical therapy and surgery in order for that person to walk again. This could result in a liability claim of $1 million or more – but your home insurance will only pay up to $250,000. The rest of the claim is your responsibility to pay – unless you have an umbrella policy. If you did, the umbrella policy would pay the remaining $750,000 due and you would not have to sell your home or dip into your personal assets to pay the claim. The example would work the same way if your automobile was the cause of the injury rather than the pool.

Because umbrella policies are not required by law, it is up to you whether or not you have one. When you consider the damage to your finances and your future that a single liability claim could have, you might find that the additional protection of an umbrella policy covering your home and auto is just enough to help you sleep easier at night.

What is spouse-employee insurance?

From the insurance point of view, a spouse-employee is the worker of a business who is a spouse to the business owner but is not an owner themselves or a professional specialist. A spouse-employee cannot be classified as an “independent contractor” as well. Speaking simply, the spouse of the business owner should work as a simple employee with no formal power to influence the profits or the decision-making process within the business.

There are a lot of elements that the IRS takes into account when qualifying a business owner’s spouse as an employee. For instance, if the spouse hare a share of more than 2% in a sub-chapter S corporation then they are classified as a business owner even if they work at the enterprise as an employee.

What’s the point?

There are certain benefits of having employee-spouse insurance:

1. The cost of covering accidents and health is deductible by the business owner if there’s such insurance option provided to his or her spouse.

2. The costs of coverage and medical bills are not included into the gross income of the spouse-employee.

In most cases, health and accident coverage the business owner gets as an employee of his own business is still subject to taxation as it is regarded as income. However, we all know that the business owner and his or her spouse-employee live in the same household and usually have the same family budget. So, if the spouse is hired as an ordinary employee the business owner can cut insurance costs and the premiums paid are not regarded as income. As a result, the spouse-employee gets health insurance free of charge. Sure, it’s the business insurance policy that pays the premiums, but it’s not included in their family budget. So if the business owner hires his spouse or any other family members as legal employees, they can benefit from virtually free health and accident insurance that the business pays for them.

Besides, the wages paid to spouse or any other family members as employees are considered as business expenses as well. And in most cases the wages the spouse receives are also used in the household. That’s why small family-bases businesses are considered to be so beneficial from the taxation point of view. Not to mention that business insurance provides additional coverage for the entire family.

Are there any catches?

It all depends on the state you set up your business in and its form, so it sure pays to consult with your tax advisor first. And don’t forget that IRS will require the business owner to provide proof that the spouse is actually performing their work instead of being a taxation shelter for the business. This is done to prevent fraud and tax speculations.

However, the biggest catch is the fact that the business owner should provide this form of small business insurance benefits to all employees, not just their spouse or family members. Otherwise, it could be classified as discrimination and cause penalties from IRS.

For example, two door cars are much likely to be stolen than their four door peers. A convertible Chevrolet Corvette has a theft rate five times higher than that of a Buick LeSabre. And Toyota Celica is 67% more likely to be stolen than her sister Toyota Camry.

Another primary factor determining the cost of insuring your car is safety of those who are inside when the car crashes. Some cars will leave the passengers intact, while others have frightening lethal rates even with non-devastating collisions. So if you want to keep your life and pay lower insurance premiums, you should definitely check out the crash test ratings and see if your dream car fits into the “safe” category.

The same should be done with car theft rates. Every year these lists change, because newer and more exclusive cars tend to become the target of car thieves more often than older models. However, some car models keep on appearing in top theft lists, contributing to their “popularity” and high insurance rates respectively. These cars are:

• Toyota Camry
• Toyota Corolla
• Toyota Pickups
• Honda Accord
• Ford F-150
• Acura Integra
• Nissan Sentra

Another factor that may raise your insurance rates is how much a single theft claim costs according to the car stolen. This variable is determined by how often such claims are filed and how much the car costs. Currently the most expensive theft claims are filed on the following cars:

• Cadillac Escalade
• Chevrolet Corvette Convertible
• Lincoln Navigator

Respectively the lowest theft claims come with the following vehicles:

• Buick LeSabre
• Volvo V70 Station Wagon
• Mercury Grand Marquis 4-four

In what concerns injury claims and passenger safety, the rule of thumb here is the bigger the car, the safer it is. Vehicles with a smaller mass tend to get damage more in accidents, and the same applies to faster sports cars. Thus the rating of the most expensive vehicles in terms of injury claims:

• Suzuki Esteem 4-door
• Kia Rio 4-door
• Mitsubishi Mirage 2-door
• Kia Spectra 4-doors

While the cars with cheap car insurance due to low injury claims are:

• GMC Sierra 2500
• GMC Yukon XL 1500 4-wheel
• Chevrolet Silverado
• Chevrolet Tahoe 2-wheel

So it is better to investigate your cheap car insurance options before actually buying the car you were dreaming about. Because in reality it may turn into a real nightmare, with costly insurance premiums, high repair costs and the risk of being stolen the other day you actually buy it.

So if a state has taken on major new commitments at a time when its tax revenues are falling, it is interesting to see it also championing new provisions that might help families struggling to make ends meet at the expense of the profits of the insurance industry. This is carrying the idea of redistribution somewhat further than Barack Obama intended during his presidential campaign. He was only talking about using taxes on rich individuals to reduce the wealth gap. This is more bold. Going back to the beginning, everyone with a vehicle on the road will tell you their insurance premiums have been rising during the recession. The Consumer Price Index may have been falling, but many now see the cost of insurance as one of the biggest headaches when it comes to the family budget. So, this November sees the state election panel accepting a ballot proposal for 2010 to cut car insurance rates by a flat 20% and to protect the consumer against a range of unfair practices. If the backers can collect 300,000 signatures, the proposal will appear on the ballot next year. Should a sufficient number of voter support the proposal, the law would be changed. In theory, it will stimulate competition between the insurance companies licensed to sell policies into Michigan and advance the interests of consumers by encouraging affordable policies for everyone.

Needless to say, the insurance industry is shocked and awed by this proposal, insisting such a change in the law would force them out of business. To many experts, this claim seems somewhat exaggerated. The insurance industry declared hundreds of millions of dollars in profit during 2008 and paid good dividends to their stockholders. Just one company, State Farm, declared profits of $5 billion. So the notion they would all become insolvent overnight is less than convincing. Voters in Michigan will say whether this change is the law is desirable. If the vote is affirmative, the legislature will move to cut industry profits. One indicator to watch will be the car insurance quotes. If these keep on rising leading up to the vote, the people may be encouraged to promote their own interests. But if the industry moderates its pricing policies up to the vote. . . Well, let’s just say the politics will be interesting.

Universal insurance policies are a form of whole life products that most of you are quite common with. Term insurance policies provide coverage only for a specified period of time, whether permanent policies require you to pay premiums for the entire life and respectively provides coverage for as long as you live. It is important to understand this difference, because universal policies can be regarded as a combination of term insurance with some of the investment options provided only with whole life policies.

Universal insurance policies are a specific insurance product that targets certain groups of people, while other groups may think it’s useless for them. To make it clear to you, here’s a short explanation of a universal life insurance policy. Like any other insurance policy used for covering life, universal policies have death benefits that are paid out when the policy holder passes away. This is what both term and continuous policies provide. However, universal policies also incorporate an element, which is more common in continuous policies: an additional tax-free savings account. This account is used to accumulate money over a long period of time, which then can be employed for paying your insurance premiums instead of you. To put it in other words, your policy will start paying for itself over a certain period of time so you won’t have to pay premiums for the entire policy term. Besides, this money can be used for other purposes as well, without affecting your death benefit like in case of whole life insurance policies.

But not everyone will find such policies useful. Universal insurance policies are most useful for those who are looking for long term insurance services and plan to have coverage upon retirement. In order to accumulate any significant amount of money at your savings account within universal insurance you’ll have to pay insurance premiums for at least 15 years before getting any results. So anyone looking for less prolonged coverage plans or mortgage securing options should look into other insurance products or special investment tools, rather than universal policies. Otherwise, having such a policy for a long time will sure give you certain possibilities that other insurance products.

First of all universal insurance is a relatively cheap life insurance if compared to whole life policies. First of all, you don’t have to pay premiums over your entire lifetime as at a certain point when there’s enough money accumulated, the policy will start paying for itself. And it won’t affect your death benefits, like most whole life insurance policies do.

In order to get the most attractive and useful universal policy you should take your time and compare life insurance quotes for this specific product type. It really pays to shop around, because different companies have different rates and options for their universal insurance polices and you of course want to get the best product for the lowest price. Don’t hesitate to see what different companies have to offer and get the policy that attracts you the most.

If credit scores were only used by banks for internal purposes, customers might weather the storm. But employers, landlords and, most importantly, insurance companies also use the scores to decide who is a responsible and reliable member of the community. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, half the nation’s employers routinely use credit scores when recruiting. The majority of insurance companies use scores when setting premiums for driving on the road. For some reason these companies have never been able to explain, they believe that people who have poor credit scores cannot drive safely on the roads. This is odd. If people cannot afford to replace their vehicles, they probably drive more carefully to reduce the risk of an accident.

California, Massachusetts and Hawaii already have laws banning the use of credit scores for auto insurance purposes. A number of other states are proposing legislation to limit or outlaw the practice. As an aside, Maryland has a ban in place for home insurance purposes. In addition to its general unfairness, the use of credit scores is also potentially discriminatory. The problem is that people who have low incomes tend to have low scores. This concentrates poor scores among some minority groups. Civil rights campaigners suggest that African American and Latino drivers with low credit scores face unlawful discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity. Naturally, the auto insurance companies deny this but, citing commercial confidentiality, refuse to produce any detailed data that would allow the issue to be settled one way or the other. As a result, the poor and disadvantaged are left with the feeling they are being victimised. What is interesting in all this is that insurers continue to be profitable in the three states where credit score use is banned, suggesting that the continuation of the practice is based on convenience. A computer can take data, apply a formula and produce a premium. If human beings had to look at files and make decisions, this would be more expensive and eat into profits.

As a sign of this practicality, the age range of nineteen to twenty-nine is the most underinsured group in the US. These are the invincible people who never believe they will fall ill and always forget they are the group most likely to be injured in traffic accidents. So when people finally see the need to insure, where do they find the affordable policies? The answer, in an ideal world, is that your state’s Department of Insurance offers some kind of guide to find affordable insurance. Every state in the union has a duty to regulate the insurance companies in their territory. They also operate complaints schemes so they know where many of the bodies are buried. So some states like Idaho publish guidance for those who do not have a health plan through their parents or employment. What you look for depends on what level of risk you want. A basic policy is better than no policy. If you have some savings or a guaranteed line of credit you can tap, go for a high deductible. Having a policy where you pay the first $5,000 is a good deal if you need long-term care. The larger the deductible you agree to, the lower the monthly premium. Really basic policies can cost less than $50 per month for a limited range of serious injuries and illness.

Being honest, you should never gamble with your own health or the health of your family but, every day, that is what this recession is forcing people to do. It would be great to be able to give you a promise that you will always find affordable health insurance, but life is not always fair. You can find you have the first symptoms of a long-term illness. Circumstances can change and the deductible you signed up for is no longer within your means. So, when you buy health insurance, you are always gambling just a little. Hopefully, you will come out a winner.

Tips on saving with reduced insurance rates

One of the easiest and most straighforward ways of getting lower insurance rates is purchasing a car that has additional safety features like front and side airbags, special seat belts, antilock breaks and so on. The majority of insurance companies offer special incentives on such safety features and such cars are generally far less expensive to insure. Another way to cut your insurance premiums is to join an official drivers club like American Automobile Association, or speaking to your employer about special discounts he or she can offer to you as a corporate entity.

In case you have a rather old car, it may be a wise choice to go off without collision and comprehensive coverages included in your policy. These types of coverage impose you to pay a certain deductible when filing a claim, and the amount of money to be paid can sometimes be larger than your car is worth.

Your insurance rates also depend on your marital status and you will see it clearly if you are engaged or were recently married. This is simply because married individuals are regarded to be less risky by insurers. When you turn 25 years old, you can also expect a drop in insurance rates, because this age is regarded as a border-line with young adulthood and drivers over 25 are considered to be less aggressive and risk-posing.

Living with parents

In case you live with your parents and don’t have your own vehicle, it’s wiser to stay with their policy as they typically have far better insurance rates as older adults. Still, when you buy your own car, most insurers will impose you to sign off from your parents’ policy and get one own your own in order to avoid any misinterpretations with vehicle property.

Financial situation

In order to save some money with auto insurance, it is recommended to see what other insurance policies you have provide. For example, having a health insurance plan can help you drop Personal Injury Protection (PIP), making it to pay for medical bills resulted from traffic accidents. Sometimes your insurance company can offer you a lower premium for limiting the amount of your medical damages with uninsured motorist coverage.

Just have common sense with cutting your insurance coverage for the sake of saving money. Ending up in a serious car accident with low coverage limits will result in far more significant spendings that you could save with cheap car insurance.

Don’t forget that the best way to get a cheap car insurance deal is to get quotes online. Shop around, compare the offers, because rates vary significantly from one company to another.

The Insurance Act provides for a fair criterion, obtained by calculating the rate of risk that the insured person has run into a traffic accident and by supplementing the insurance premium rating.

The variables taken into account are different from company to company and may include for example the age, accidents caused in the past, geographical origin, sex, length of license (how long you have the license), in some cases have also considered the safety equipment of the vehicle you are providing (ABS and airbags may involve paying a lower premium), the location where normally you drive (in different provinces of registration are different rates of risk and therefore various insurance premiums).

The premium payable will be different depending on the type of policy stipulates that if the bonus relief.

The policy bonus malus calculates the premium based on the class, which is obtained under the insurance history.

The bill with relief, however, puts a part of the compensation to dependents of the insured, and costs the same amount regardless of the class of substance.

The insurance premium can only be paid at once, regularly paid to agreed timetables, or split, that is paid in installments.

The prize consists of a premium, to which you add up the specific charges in each case, to obtain the so-called premium pricing. Adding the premium tax rate is obtained by the insurance premium, which is the final sum that the insured must pay the insurance company, In calculating the final figure to be paid as insurance premium because there are also a 12.5% tax and a 10.50% contribution to National Health Service as a share to promote the hospital care of road accidents victims.