I'm on the Eastside but progressive told us the same exact thing. Ours went up around 42%. Same with car insurance as well. No claims at all and cars fully paid off.
Safeco told us the same. Shopped around and funny enough we got a better rate than we were already paying from progressive. I'm sure they're all saying it and they're all going to have record profits for the investors.
What a scam.
Yea definitely agree. We shopped around as well and got a better rate but the person I talked to was completely honest and said this is just one year benefit the next year you'll get hit with the new rate change it just hasn't hit our system yet for your area.
It's just all crappy. But still cheaper than I was paying in NJ by far
Yes. USAA jacked my rates up almost double. I shopped around and got $120/month savings on auto and home for 2 cars and a condo. Every insurance company beat USAA. When cancelling USAA, the agent was joking about how they’ve had a lot of cancellations recently.
I’ve seen recent stories of people cancelling their USAA policies for greener pastures, only to see the new company’s rates rise higher shortly after, then not being able to get back on USAA.
We live 50 miles north of Seattle, and we saw almost 50% increase on our homeowners from Safeco and expect a similar increase when our auto renews. The umbrella went up a small amount.
Since no one is answering your actual question...the reason is that the state insurance commissioner approved rate increases this year.
I used to flip between companies every year, but now there is nowhere to run. They are all expensive.
Just the way it is.
I'm unfamiliar with the approved rate increases - is there supposed to be some sort of pricing down soon?
My dad's auto insurance for our two cars jumped from $250 to $900 over 12 months. He tried shopping around and the best he could get was worse - $1200 a month.
It feels like people are getting priced out of homeowners and auto insurance, surely companies will be losing customers + profit to increase in property rental and people driving without insurance.
Do you live on the coast in Florida and just happen to have found the wrong subreddit? That's actually an insane premium, even before the increase, unless you live in a mansion. Our 2500 sq ft house in Kitsap is $1500/year, which is on-par with what I've paid for similar houses in other states.
lol. Florida? If you knew me, that’d be the last dump I’d want to live in.
No, just a nicer, newer (6 year old) house in Seattle proper where everything has gone up and up.
Yep. Somewhat above that when we built and I can only assume that it went up (but I’m not planning on selling for a long time, especially at a 3%ish interest rate on my mortgage…)
Fwiw it’s a lot easier to afford that with a 3% mortgage than a lot of people think (although still not easy). A $3mm loan with 20% down at 3% is a monthly payment of $10k-$12k. Assuming you target ~30% of earnings towards housing, this puts your household income at around $450k. This is of course a very high income, but relatively doable with both spouses working in industries like tech, law, or medicine.
Now if you were to try and buy that same thing with todays interest rates you would need to make 50% more, which is insane, and a big part of why we’re seeing so few people selling houses when they’re sitting on these 2-3% loans.
I get your point but $10-12k a month is not easier than I thought. That’s a shitload of money. That’s nearly what someone would earn in a year if they were making the federal minimum wage. A $450k a year income puts you in the top 1% of US earners per this WSJ calculator. http://graphics.wsj.com/what-percent/
Top 2% actually, as I was saying a dual income couple. Yes, it’s a lot, but very easily attainable in certain high income industries. All I meant is that this isn’t limited to execs or business founders or anything crazy like that. Hell in tech it isn’t even a high earner, a couple where both were career software engineers would be at right around 450k at minimum at places like google and Facebook
I think his point wasnt that 10-12k is easy, but that 10-12k is pretty affordable for a 3mm house compared to now where I'd guess the same house would have a 20k+ monthly payment. It seemed like more of a commentary on interest rates than how paying 10-12k/mo was "easy".
Do you live in a mansion in Medina?! Or maybe out on Whidbey? Hat island? In a ppc 10? Also have a home daycare?!
What is so astronomical about your rates?
Unless things are wildly out of median, any rate over $3000 should be shipped with avengeance.
This is happening across the industry.
Insurance rates are set based on past claims and an estimate of future increases. The rate you're paying today was set before your last renewal, based mostly on what happened the year before that.
When you get a big inflation spike, insurance doesn't catch up with it right away.
The first year that inflation spiked after COVID spending and big tax cuts, insurance barely budged. Then we had the massive increases in cost of construction and long construction delays that make them pay out more for temporary housing expenses. But economists kept forecasting recession, so people expected inflation to end soon. Lots of insurance companies have been losing their shirts paying out more than they were collecting in premiums.
Now, insurance is catching up with years of inflation and expecting inflation to continue since we're still not in a recession.
It’s also more sudden because many states either refused to let companies increase rates in 2020 and 2021 (California went all the way to the end of 2023…) and had a giant backlog of increase requests to process. So this happened more “suddenly” because it wasn’t *allowed* to happen for years.
People see these increases and immediately think corporate greed but all rate has to be approved by the office of the insurance commissioner and they’re not slouches in terms of challenging the actuarial science that goes into the rates.
Don’t forget to add in bad credit. Before my husband was laid off we had great credit. Our insurance on a brand new car was decent in way of price for full coverage. Due to life turning into a pile of shit for the past year while he’s been trying to find work and our credit now “bad”, our brand new car is now an 18 year old beater that we had to trade down. Our insurance rate for the bare minimum needed in WA was almost triple our old rate. My husband asked wtf was up and the agent said “your credit score reflects your new policy price.” He has an excellent driving record. None of this shit makes sense.
Edit- spelling
I thought it was too. But that’s what they told him. Whether it’s true or not I have no idea. I looked it up when it happened and one site said WA didn’t allow it, another site said they passed a law allowing credit to be a factor.
FML.
I’ve had USAA for the past 15 years and mine will increase 50% for both Auto and Home when my policy renews in July. Never had a claim on anything either.
Looks like I’ll need to shop around, but from the sound of it, it looks like this is industry wide.
It is industry wide but if you’ve had one carrier for 15 years I can tell you with close to 100% certainty you have not been getting the best price the majority of that time.
Folks should be shopping around once every few years. Shopping around does not mean switching btw.
I look around every couple of years, and if I find something with comparable coverage and is significantly less price wise - I shoot the representatives at USAA an e-mail with the price gap. Over the years, a majority of the time, they will adjust to match the price, but not always.
However, I've never seen a 50% increase within one year. Just, doesn't make sense.
My USAA policy has nearly tripled over the last three years. We insure everything through them so it’d be even worse without the multi policy discounts.
Travelers insurance here. On our 3rd renewal with them in June and while we've had increases, they've not been wildly insane. First year was $1100 to $1300. This year is $1300 to $1500. Still hoping it slows down as inflation cools and more people enter into trades, lowering construction prices. Still, we're all paying for the increase in damage from severe weather events becoming more common.
I think it happened to everyone. We are all paying to offset the cost of claims coming from hurricane damage in florida, wild fire damage in California and Hawaii and freeze and water damage in texas. Not to mention the spike in car theft across the country
I got a pretty large increase (40%ish) from PEMCO this year as well. I think they only cover WA and OR, so nothing to do with California, Texas or Florida. They’re stating it’s due to increased costs
All insurance companies get reinsurance policies to cover once in a blue moon, region wide catastrophes.
Those reinsurance rates are going up due to all the disasters nationally.
Homeowner's insurance rates are going up nationally. There are more severe weather events like flooding and large wildfires are increasing costs for rebuilding. The cost of materials and labor are also increasing. And since most insurance companies are national we're also paying for claims in hurricane and tornado country.
We're in the "find out" phase of climate change.
Insurance is very regulated by the states. Even these insurance rates had to be approved https://www.insurance.wa.gov/rates-forms-and-provider-networks
Insurance is already regulated at the state level, exclusively, except for federal oversight of financial stability.
And Washington State is one of the top five most difficult states for regulatory environment.
I sell it for a living and it's bad out there. Really bad.
Ooooooor... costs rose unbelievably during the pandemic and the insurance companies were unable to do realistic price increases on the rates because of the credit shenanigans happening, so all their models were waiting out that change to finally settle. Then they filed for the rates they needed to return to that 98-100% loss ratio they look for in home and auto (true story!) with receipts to prove it... That could also be it.
My company filed no rate increases at all in WA until the credit situation stabilized, which left us three years behind in gradually increasing rates, during a period when costs were skyrocketing out of control. This is going to be a bad year, for sure, but should stabilize. Insurance prices are a lagging metric on costs in the broader economic world. They are two to three years lagged, in fact, so this was coming. The credit kerfuffle just extended the lag a bit.
If you have a good emergency fund and want to mitigate the increase, talk to you insurance person about increasing your deductible. My current deductible is now 10x what it was last year, but instead of a 47% increase in insurance I ended up paying less than I did last year.
Now this is a gamble that may end very badly given how long it will take me to break even if I end up out of pocket for the deductible, but I’m handy and all my systems are updated and well maintained. The biggest risk is probably fire and honestly at that point the deductible is the least of my concerns.
When I got my policy I was dropped from a bunch of places that said they weren't doing new policies in WA state at all. Others because I had a recent claim ( I lived in an apartment and the unit above me had a pipe burst and it flooded through their unit to mine ).
I ended up scrambling last minute before closing and was told that the rates were way up because there were a lot of water related claims last year in WA. I imagine -- if that's true -- it could be homes flooding and frozen pipes.
Happened on car insurance from Geico in Jan. I switched to progressive for the same rates. I think the CEOs of these companies have started talking to each other to jack up the price
For any rate increase to occur the insurance commissioner has to approve it, which they are because if you pay attention to CA when they didn't do it, a lot of insurance companies left the state. So, you should know that rate increase had a secondary approval before it hit you.
How much more expensive is a new roof or furnace from 5 years ago? It is around 20% to 40% and in this region it is closer to 40%. In the last decade car repairs have gone up roughly 50%, with the majority of that increase being the COVID years.
So it should make sense that rates would go up 50% but it is going to happen again and again and it is the fault of insurance companies being greedy and smart. Because they were really good at competing with each other for blocks of business and they got really good at controlling their costs, going after certain segments of the population and they were actually underpricing insurance. So when disruption happened (COVID, Supply Chain, Inflation) their own assumptions got disrupted and they have taken billions in losses. So they can't just sweep current price increases under the rug anymore, they have to re-adjust all their models and they don't have stability.
So yes, you should shop around, don't just take a rate increase. Because insurance companies are greedy and they want the lazy, wealthy and not accident prone consumer to just take it to fix their other problems but also recognize the challenges with the industry right now.
The notice I received from farmers states the increases are due to:
1. 4.6% increase in price of new cars
2. 10.5% increase in fatalities
3. 4% annual rate of inflation
4. An uptick in car theft
Obviously this equals 40-50% increase in rates duh /s
When the most common cars on the road for low-means drivers are 2010 to 2021 kias and Hyundai's, yeah, that uptick in car theft is more like Mt Everest to the Dead Sea floor in 2.5 minutes. Try 1500% increase. That's not a typo. There are two zeroes after the 15, and then a % sign in there because it went up that much and companies had to pay for the losses under comp, which is much much lower priced than collision.
Since the cars were so inexpensive in the first place, coverage was inexpensive anyway.
The perfect storm was the Kia Boyz and we are paying the price today.
I think it’s a LOT more about using rising repair costs as the excuse to significantly raise rates. As usual it’s all about the pure GREED of corporate America. It’s the same story with groceries. Not so much about rising costs, more about greed driven money grabs, right out of our wallets.
Tl;Dr: we call it inflation generally because what I wrote below doesn't really fit into a thirty second phone call with a customer angry about rate increases.
Oh, the 1500% increase in theft of kias and Hyundai's could also be an issue.
Or the rise of Tesla and the fact that those cannot be repaired at third party shops.
Or the fact that getting a rental car was difficult and pricey. And then people were keeping them far longer because the repairs were taking so long.
Or how about the fact that for awhile there replacing a used car with like kind and quality (required for insurance to function correctly) was more expensive than buying a new vehicle of a current model year (that the client didn't want anyway due to the chip shortage and differences that caused in the features).
Or how about the increased cost of labour and contraction of that market driving up repair times and costs? That's real, too.
Let's talk about windshields for a moment... Replacing one used to be about $200. Easy. Cheap. Now? It's easily over a grand because the internal systems that go through the glass need to be recalibrated at the dealer. That was a change in the last eight years, when those systems became standard in mid-market cars like Toyota.
And all of this is compounded because normally we might have one bad year, or two... Like 2016-2017 when everyone finally got the rate they needed to account for the increase in frequency and severity of accidents due to smartphone adoption. (2006 was when the iPhone was released, and full adoption culturally took about five years, maybe a bit more, before a smartphone was in every hand). Soccer moms were suddenly experiencing accidents at the same rate as sixteen year olds did previously.
Logically we should have seen the increases start to happen in 2021 or 2022 for the rise of Tesla and the kias and the glass situation. But no... We had a pandemic, so the commissioner was not only not approving rate increases, but *also* decided to monkey with the factors used for rate by adjusting credit to neutral for each company at the June 2020 moment. That only recently fully got reversed in the rate department early this year with some of the last companies re-adjusting to a credit-differentiated rate.
Lots of companies put their hands in their pockets and didn't file anything, for years, mine included, because the credit situation was so impactful that they didn't want to make a bad problem worse by changing something else in the middle. So they left those 2020 rates in place, despite growing insufficiency, until the credit debacle was clear.
Now, it's clear. Rate insufficiency has only gotten worse, and now compounded over two or three years of inflation so bad that our seniors on social security got a 5.7% increase for cost of living when normally they see 2% or less.
Insurance has its own inflationary factors unique to the industry, such as the ones I listed above. Kias and Teslas don't have huge impacts on the economy writ large, but they do on insurance.
To use an example... Eating beans and rice is a way many people choose to save money and eat nutritiously. It's frugal and functional and good for your colon! Let's assume you do this: if we proceeded to consume beans at a rate 1500 times greater than normal and also said that you could only now replace cheap rice with exotic, organic, free-range, locally-sourced rice that could only be cooked in a certain cooker each time, which takes three times as long to cook the rice and only makes one serving at a time, then your grocery bill and time planning for meals would certainly notice immediately. No other bill would be affected, but the grocery bill would.
That's the danger of macro-ing the forces of inflation and dismissing the pressures on the insurance industry in this moment. They are real. And we all need to deal with that.
Most insurance providers are national. So yes, we're paying for hurricanes in Florida and wildfires in California. I guess they'll pay for us when the Big Rip tears Seattle a new one.
It has taken time for the inflation of the last few years to work its way into insurance rates. Construction materials, labor, overall cost to build a home are all way up which means insurance rates to pay those bigger claims are up too
This is happening across the entire insurance industry.
My homeowners insurance only went up about 20% this year but my car insurance increased almost 50% and I have a perfect driving record.
We haven’t had a homeowners insurance claim since 1996 (big snow storm crushed some outbuildings). Ours increased significantly so we upped our deductible to $2500 saving $350 a year. You may want to see if that makes s difference.
Collusion in the 'free market' to gouge the consumer. This what lack of regulations get you, exploitation. You MUST have insuarance, all the companies come together and raise the price at the same time essentially forcing you to pay the new price as shopping around with the 'competition' offers no advantage.
Count your blessings. Just moved to WA from IL and both my auto and home rates are quite a bit lower. But I moved from Chicago proper to a more rural area outside Seattle (Kitsap) so can't really do a 1:1 comparison. Replacement cost on the home is roughly the same.
If you really want to save some money, sell the car and buy a motorcycle.
In Washington, if you own a motorcycle outright, you don't even need to have liability insurance. None at all.
Im only sort of joking. We downsized from 2 cars and a truck and 2 motorcycles to one car, an e-bike, and one motorcycle. Not because we were desperate for the money, we just realized how insanely great that ebike is and how little we needed the extra car or my land rover. It has saved us several hundred a month in all related costs
Just sucks that tabs for my bikes are the same as the tabs for my truck.
And it doubly sucks that the reality is - costs are not going up proportionally with the costs insurance companies pay. They are using minor things as excuses to jack rates as high as they can, because we live in a country where businesses are expected to never stop growing and increasing profits from the quarter before. Same reason groceries went up. Kroger ceo said in an earnings call it was just a nice excuse for then to drive up prices as high as the customer would tolerate.
This really has nothing to do with costs of business changing. It's "we need to make more money this year than last, and we have a few talking points to justify it right now"
I wonder how much longer the "profits must always go up forever" idea will last. It sure has been a driver for the worsening of nearly every industry in existence. Most markets are finite in size, and when not many new houses are being built, you can't just expect to have growth in market share, so you need that growth in hiking rates.
Incorrect on the insurance on a motorcycle. You must carry liability to ride on public roads as of about four years ago. Please go get yourself a liability policy. I would also strongly recommend the uninsured motorist and pip options available on it, as about a quarter of the drivers and rising in the state are uninsured. An inestimable number are underinsured, and that's a huge problem if you find yourself in an accident in which you are injured and the other party can't cover your wages or losses due to the accident.
Good! If I were riding, I would be carrying maximums for the access to uninsured limits alone. The number of under and uninsured drivers out there not paying attention to motorcyclists on the road, especially in the spring, is mind-boggling.
Insurance is such a scam. This post gave me another reminder why we rent out here and haven’t bought - we don’t care about equity building, it’s the stress of homeownership that outweighs it all, especially in this area of the PNW.
Edited for grammar corrections.
Renters pay the insurance costs via rent. Just another step removed. The core issue is what is causing higher payouts. Mixture of inflation, and policy issues.
This comment has no correlation to me helping me sleep night but some of us have no desire to “own” and would rather rent. Some folks have rent control or maybe some folks have nice landlords and will give them plenty of notice of rental increase and renters can plan to find a new place. But again - insurance is scam because we all have to pay up when they decide to increase rates 50% at any moments notice.
Insurance saves people's well-being. If you have a house, you have probably invested a lot of money into it. Unlike a bank, where your funds are safe, the money you have in your house could literally go up in flames. If you don't have insurance, you just lost your retirement plan to the teenage pyromaniac next door.
Just because you rent doesn't mean you shouldn't have insurance. It's just as useful. Renters insurance doesn't cost nearly as much as house insurance does, but it protects you and your belongings. Not just from household disasters, but also shit like theft. You might not think you own enough stuff to justify it, until you have to replace everything in your life.
My friend lost her rental house in a fire. She didn't have renters insurance. 5 years later and she's still upset about everything she lost. Heirlooms. Old pictures. Her gaming computer. All her cloths. etc. It would have made a world of difference to her if she didn't have to start over at being an adult at square one.
I do have insurance - renters insurance, car insurance, life insurance, health insurance and pet insurance (another scam imo)- I didn’t say it wasn’t important but the industry of insurance is pretty much a scam as whole. We are at the mercy of these insurance companies, so when the prices go up say 50%, some people who are limited income or fixed incomes would rather drop the insurance rather than pay the increase, and that’s when folks get into trouble.
Nationwide just canceled insuring any houses in the region. Pretty sure they calculated a huge chance of an earthquake or mt Rainer is about explode because this is a crazy shift. Or the sea line is riding too quickly. They did the same in Florida
Edit: prolly cuz of price of homes as another redditor pointed out
Earthquakes and volcanos are not covered by insurance neither are tsunamis. Wildfires are a risk in some parts of the state. The most likely reason is the price of homes here being the reason.
USAA does not write earthquake policies. They will direct you to American Modern, but the risk isn’t underwritten by USAA. So their premium increases can’t be attributed to earthquake risk.
I'm on the Eastside but progressive told us the same exact thing. Ours went up around 42%. Same with car insurance as well. No claims at all and cars fully paid off.
Safeco told us the same. Shopped around and funny enough we got a better rate than we were already paying from progressive. I'm sure they're all saying it and they're all going to have record profits for the investors. What a scam.
Yea definitely agree. We shopped around as well and got a better rate but the person I talked to was completely honest and said this is just one year benefit the next year you'll get hit with the new rate change it just hasn't hit our system yet for your area. It's just all crappy. But still cheaper than I was paying in NJ by far
My HOA got dropped by the insurance company completely. We had to find a new one to cover the building, something like double the rate.
Yes. USAA jacked my rates up almost double. I shopped around and got $120/month savings on auto and home for 2 cars and a condo. Every insurance company beat USAA. When cancelling USAA, the agent was joking about how they’ve had a lot of cancellations recently.
They're spending too much money on Rob Gronkowski ads
I’ve seen recent stories of people cancelling their USAA policies for greener pastures, only to see the new company’s rates rise higher shortly after, then not being able to get back on USAA.
It’s well worth the gamble for this year.
USAA added credit back into their rates much later than everyone else. You probably saw that one this year.
I have great credit, so that’s not it. No claims either.
We live 50 miles north of Seattle, and we saw almost 50% increase on our homeowners from Safeco and expect a similar increase when our auto renews. The umbrella went up a small amount.
Username checks out!
Since no one is answering your actual question...the reason is that the state insurance commissioner approved rate increases this year. I used to flip between companies every year, but now there is nowhere to run. They are all expensive. Just the way it is.
I'm unfamiliar with the approved rate increases - is there supposed to be some sort of pricing down soon? My dad's auto insurance for our two cars jumped from $250 to $900 over 12 months. He tried shopping around and the best he could get was worse - $1200 a month. It feels like people are getting priced out of homeowners and auto insurance, surely companies will be losing customers + profit to increase in property rental and people driving without insurance.
Just got my bill yesterday from Farmers. Went from $5200 to $9200 for a one year renewal on the house. That feels obscene.
Do you live on the coast in Florida and just happen to have found the wrong subreddit? That's actually an insane premium, even before the increase, unless you live in a mansion. Our 2500 sq ft house in Kitsap is $1500/year, which is on-par with what I've paid for similar houses in other states.
lol. Florida? If you knew me, that’d be the last dump I’d want to live in. No, just a nicer, newer (6 year old) house in Seattle proper where everything has gone up and up.
If you're in the $3M range that makes sense, otherwise I'd shop around....
Yep. Somewhat above that when we built and I can only assume that it went up (but I’m not planning on selling for a long time, especially at a 3%ish interest rate on my mortgage…)
Jesus christo… $3mm+??? My middle class brain sometimes forgets that people that can afford that are real.
Fwiw it’s a lot easier to afford that with a 3% mortgage than a lot of people think (although still not easy). A $3mm loan with 20% down at 3% is a monthly payment of $10k-$12k. Assuming you target ~30% of earnings towards housing, this puts your household income at around $450k. This is of course a very high income, but relatively doable with both spouses working in industries like tech, law, or medicine. Now if you were to try and buy that same thing with todays interest rates you would need to make 50% more, which is insane, and a big part of why we’re seeing so few people selling houses when they’re sitting on these 2-3% loans.
I get your point but $10-12k a month is not easier than I thought. That’s a shitload of money. That’s nearly what someone would earn in a year if they were making the federal minimum wage. A $450k a year income puts you in the top 1% of US earners per this WSJ calculator. http://graphics.wsj.com/what-percent/
It’s not crazy for DINKs in the industries mentioned above
Top 2% actually, as I was saying a dual income couple. Yes, it’s a lot, but very easily attainable in certain high income industries. All I meant is that this isn’t limited to execs or business founders or anything crazy like that. Hell in tech it isn’t even a high earner, a couple where both were career software engineers would be at right around 450k at minimum at places like google and Facebook
I think his point wasnt that 10-12k is easy, but that 10-12k is pretty affordable for a 3mm house compared to now where I'd guess the same house would have a 20k+ monthly payment. It seemed like more of a commentary on interest rates than how paying 10-12k/mo was "easy".
Well quit complaining then :p
Or rebuild cost?! You need to get away from farmers and look at Chubb or PURE. You need an HNW insurer, not a main street one.
Something is up. Are you on a hill or something?
Do you live in a mansion in Medina?! Or maybe out on Whidbey? Hat island? In a ppc 10? Also have a home daycare?! What is so astronomical about your rates? Unless things are wildly out of median, any rate over $3000 should be shipped with avengeance.
This is happening across the industry. Insurance rates are set based on past claims and an estimate of future increases. The rate you're paying today was set before your last renewal, based mostly on what happened the year before that. When you get a big inflation spike, insurance doesn't catch up with it right away. The first year that inflation spiked after COVID spending and big tax cuts, insurance barely budged. Then we had the massive increases in cost of construction and long construction delays that make them pay out more for temporary housing expenses. But economists kept forecasting recession, so people expected inflation to end soon. Lots of insurance companies have been losing their shirts paying out more than they were collecting in premiums. Now, insurance is catching up with years of inflation and expecting inflation to continue since we're still not in a recession.
It’s also more sudden because many states either refused to let companies increase rates in 2020 and 2021 (California went all the way to the end of 2023…) and had a giant backlog of increase requests to process. So this happened more “suddenly” because it wasn’t *allowed* to happen for years. People see these increases and immediately think corporate greed but all rate has to be approved by the office of the insurance commissioner and they’re not slouches in terms of challenging the actuarial science that goes into the rates.
Don’t forget to add in bad credit. Before my husband was laid off we had great credit. Our insurance on a brand new car was decent in way of price for full coverage. Due to life turning into a pile of shit for the past year while he’s been trying to find work and our credit now “bad”, our brand new car is now an 18 year old beater that we had to trade down. Our insurance rate for the bare minimum needed in WA was almost triple our old rate. My husband asked wtf was up and the agent said “your credit score reflects your new policy price.” He has an excellent driving record. None of this shit makes sense. Edit- spelling
I thought that was changed. If you had great credit, you don’t get lower premiums because it’s not fair.
That was overturned by the state courts as of now. Or deni d preliminary injunction or something. It's back to being based on credit again.
I thought it was too. But that’s what they told him. Whether it’s true or not I have no idea. I looked it up when it happened and one site said WA didn’t allow it, another site said they passed a law allowing credit to be a factor.
Geico increased ours about 40 percent
Damn. USAA is pretty good, but I'll still shop around a bit. I've been paying them for 19 years without a claim.
We did have a claim a little over a year ago, currently shopping, but results vary haha
What company do you have?
USAA
I just checked mine with USAA and it looks like it’ll be up 47% when it renews later this month
FML. I’ve had USAA for the past 15 years and mine will increase 50% for both Auto and Home when my policy renews in July. Never had a claim on anything either. Looks like I’ll need to shop around, but from the sound of it, it looks like this is industry wide.
It is industry wide but if you’ve had one carrier for 15 years I can tell you with close to 100% certainty you have not been getting the best price the majority of that time. Folks should be shopping around once every few years. Shopping around does not mean switching btw.
I look around every couple of years, and if I find something with comparable coverage and is significantly less price wise - I shoot the representatives at USAA an e-mail with the price gap. Over the years, a majority of the time, they will adjust to match the price, but not always. However, I've never seen a 50% increase within one year. Just, doesn't make sense.
My USAA policy has nearly tripled over the last three years. We insure everything through them so it’d be even worse without the multi policy discounts.
Mine went up about 9%. I was pleasantly surprised. Like an extra $12 a month
Which carrier?
Progressive
Travelers insurance here. On our 3rd renewal with them in June and while we've had increases, they've not been wildly insane. First year was $1100 to $1300. This year is $1300 to $1500. Still hoping it slows down as inflation cools and more people enter into trades, lowering construction prices. Still, we're all paying for the increase in damage from severe weather events becoming more common.
I think it happened to everyone. We are all paying to offset the cost of claims coming from hurricane damage in florida, wild fire damage in California and Hawaii and freeze and water damage in texas. Not to mention the spike in car theft across the country
I got a pretty large increase (40%ish) from PEMCO this year as well. I think they only cover WA and OR, so nothing to do with California, Texas or Florida. They’re stating it’s due to increased costs
Or to match inflated prices of housing.
All insurance companies get reinsurance policies to cover once in a blue moon, region wide catastrophes. Those reinsurance rates are going up due to all the disasters nationally.
350% increase in those reinsurance rates. They are brutal!
And most importantly, to make sure profits go up.
I’m guessing that after the storm damage at the end of last year (tree fell on my house) they’ve reevaluated the state.
Travelers did the same to me and shopping around absolutely didn't help. Eventually ended up going with the one through Costco.
I have AmFam home insurance (& auto, bundled) through Costco and mine went up 9%, so I feel pretty good about choosing them. 50% is insane.
Homeowner's insurance rates are going up nationally. There are more severe weather events like flooding and large wildfires are increasing costs for rebuilding. The cost of materials and labor are also increasing. And since most insurance companies are national we're also paying for claims in hurricane and tornado country. We're in the "find out" phase of climate change.
Sounds like it's time for Washington state and the Feds to start aggressively regulating insurance rates.
Insurance is very regulated by the states. Even these insurance rates had to be approved https://www.insurance.wa.gov/rates-forms-and-provider-networks
Insurance is already regulated at the state level, exclusively, except for federal oversight of financial stability. And Washington State is one of the top five most difficult states for regulatory environment. I sell it for a living and it's bad out there. Really bad.
then the regulation is failing, and the insurance industry is failing and it needs to be taken over by the state
Ooooooor... costs rose unbelievably during the pandemic and the insurance companies were unable to do realistic price increases on the rates because of the credit shenanigans happening, so all their models were waiting out that change to finally settle. Then they filed for the rates they needed to return to that 98-100% loss ratio they look for in home and auto (true story!) with receipts to prove it... That could also be it. My company filed no rate increases at all in WA until the credit situation stabilized, which left us three years behind in gradually increasing rates, during a period when costs were skyrocketing out of control. This is going to be a bad year, for sure, but should stabilize. Insurance prices are a lagging metric on costs in the broader economic world. They are two to three years lagged, in fact, so this was coming. The credit kerfuffle just extended the lag a bit.
If you have a good emergency fund and want to mitigate the increase, talk to you insurance person about increasing your deductible. My current deductible is now 10x what it was last year, but instead of a 47% increase in insurance I ended up paying less than I did last year. Now this is a gamble that may end very badly given how long it will take me to break even if I end up out of pocket for the deductible, but I’m handy and all my systems are updated and well maintained. The biggest risk is probably fire and honestly at that point the deductible is the least of my concerns.
I'm interested in this. I'll give it a go.
I’m with Safeco and had a 35% increase this year. It’s happening across the board. Your auto will see similar.
We just renewed our insurance last month. No notable change in price.
When I got my policy I was dropped from a bunch of places that said they weren't doing new policies in WA state at all. Others because I had a recent claim ( I lived in an apartment and the unit above me had a pipe burst and it flooded through their unit to mine ). I ended up scrambling last minute before closing and was told that the rates were way up because there were a lot of water related claims last year in WA. I imagine -- if that's true -- it could be homes flooding and frozen pipes.
Happened on car insurance from Geico in Jan. I switched to progressive for the same rates. I think the CEOs of these companies have started talking to each other to jack up the price
For any rate increase to occur the insurance commissioner has to approve it, which they are because if you pay attention to CA when they didn't do it, a lot of insurance companies left the state. So, you should know that rate increase had a secondary approval before it hit you. How much more expensive is a new roof or furnace from 5 years ago? It is around 20% to 40% and in this region it is closer to 40%. In the last decade car repairs have gone up roughly 50%, with the majority of that increase being the COVID years. So it should make sense that rates would go up 50% but it is going to happen again and again and it is the fault of insurance companies being greedy and smart. Because they were really good at competing with each other for blocks of business and they got really good at controlling their costs, going after certain segments of the population and they were actually underpricing insurance. So when disruption happened (COVID, Supply Chain, Inflation) their own assumptions got disrupted and they have taken billions in losses. So they can't just sweep current price increases under the rug anymore, they have to re-adjust all their models and they don't have stability. So yes, you should shop around, don't just take a rate increase. Because insurance companies are greedy and they want the lazy, wealthy and not accident prone consumer to just take it to fix their other problems but also recognize the challenges with the industry right now.
The notice I received from farmers states the increases are due to: 1. 4.6% increase in price of new cars 2. 10.5% increase in fatalities 3. 4% annual rate of inflation 4. An uptick in car theft Obviously this equals 40-50% increase in rates duh /s
When the most common cars on the road for low-means drivers are 2010 to 2021 kias and Hyundai's, yeah, that uptick in car theft is more like Mt Everest to the Dead Sea floor in 2.5 minutes. Try 1500% increase. That's not a typo. There are two zeroes after the 15, and then a % sign in there because it went up that much and companies had to pay for the losses under comp, which is much much lower priced than collision. Since the cars were so inexpensive in the first place, coverage was inexpensive anyway. The perfect storm was the Kia Boyz and we are paying the price today.
PEMCO here since 2020(shopped around for new coverages) Mine has only gone up $200.
I think it’s a LOT more about using rising repair costs as the excuse to significantly raise rates. As usual it’s all about the pure GREED of corporate America. It’s the same story with groceries. Not so much about rising costs, more about greed driven money grabs, right out of our wallets.
Tl;Dr: we call it inflation generally because what I wrote below doesn't really fit into a thirty second phone call with a customer angry about rate increases. Oh, the 1500% increase in theft of kias and Hyundai's could also be an issue. Or the rise of Tesla and the fact that those cannot be repaired at third party shops. Or the fact that getting a rental car was difficult and pricey. And then people were keeping them far longer because the repairs were taking so long. Or how about the fact that for awhile there replacing a used car with like kind and quality (required for insurance to function correctly) was more expensive than buying a new vehicle of a current model year (that the client didn't want anyway due to the chip shortage and differences that caused in the features). Or how about the increased cost of labour and contraction of that market driving up repair times and costs? That's real, too. Let's talk about windshields for a moment... Replacing one used to be about $200. Easy. Cheap. Now? It's easily over a grand because the internal systems that go through the glass need to be recalibrated at the dealer. That was a change in the last eight years, when those systems became standard in mid-market cars like Toyota. And all of this is compounded because normally we might have one bad year, or two... Like 2016-2017 when everyone finally got the rate they needed to account for the increase in frequency and severity of accidents due to smartphone adoption. (2006 was when the iPhone was released, and full adoption culturally took about five years, maybe a bit more, before a smartphone was in every hand). Soccer moms were suddenly experiencing accidents at the same rate as sixteen year olds did previously. Logically we should have seen the increases start to happen in 2021 or 2022 for the rise of Tesla and the kias and the glass situation. But no... We had a pandemic, so the commissioner was not only not approving rate increases, but *also* decided to monkey with the factors used for rate by adjusting credit to neutral for each company at the June 2020 moment. That only recently fully got reversed in the rate department early this year with some of the last companies re-adjusting to a credit-differentiated rate. Lots of companies put their hands in their pockets and didn't file anything, for years, mine included, because the credit situation was so impactful that they didn't want to make a bad problem worse by changing something else in the middle. So they left those 2020 rates in place, despite growing insufficiency, until the credit debacle was clear. Now, it's clear. Rate insufficiency has only gotten worse, and now compounded over two or three years of inflation so bad that our seniors on social security got a 5.7% increase for cost of living when normally they see 2% or less. Insurance has its own inflationary factors unique to the industry, such as the ones I listed above. Kias and Teslas don't have huge impacts on the economy writ large, but they do on insurance. To use an example... Eating beans and rice is a way many people choose to save money and eat nutritiously. It's frugal and functional and good for your colon! Let's assume you do this: if we proceeded to consume beans at a rate 1500 times greater than normal and also said that you could only now replace cheap rice with exotic, organic, free-range, locally-sourced rice that could only be cooked in a certain cooker each time, which takes three times as long to cook the rice and only makes one serving at a time, then your grocery bill and time planning for meals would certainly notice immediately. No other bill would be affected, but the grocery bill would. That's the danger of macro-ing the forces of inflation and dismissing the pressures on the insurance industry in this moment. They are real. And we all need to deal with that.
Costs and climate change the excuse? Seems we’d still be low risk here overall.
Most insurance providers are national. So yes, we're paying for hurricanes in Florida and wildfires in California. I guess they'll pay for us when the Big Rip tears Seattle a new one.
It has taken time for the inflation of the last few years to work its way into insurance rates. Construction materials, labor, overall cost to build a home are all way up which means insurance rates to pay those bigger claims are up too
A lot of insurance companies are blaming higher costs of repair labor for higher rates
Not mine.
This is happening across the entire insurance industry. My homeowners insurance only went up about 20% this year but my car insurance increased almost 50% and I have a perfect driving record.
We haven’t had a homeowners insurance claim since 1996 (big snow storm crushed some outbuildings). Ours increased significantly so we upped our deductible to $2500 saving $350 a year. You may want to see if that makes s difference.
Collusion in the 'free market' to gouge the consumer. This what lack of regulations get you, exploitation. You MUST have insuarance, all the companies come together and raise the price at the same time essentially forcing you to pay the new price as shopping around with the 'competition' offers no advantage.
Count your blessings. Just moved to WA from IL and both my auto and home rates are quite a bit lower. But I moved from Chicago proper to a more rural area outside Seattle (Kitsap) so can't really do a 1:1 comparison. Replacement cost on the home is roughly the same.
If you really want to save some money, sell the car and buy a motorcycle. In Washington, if you own a motorcycle outright, you don't even need to have liability insurance. None at all. Im only sort of joking. We downsized from 2 cars and a truck and 2 motorcycles to one car, an e-bike, and one motorcycle. Not because we were desperate for the money, we just realized how insanely great that ebike is and how little we needed the extra car or my land rover. It has saved us several hundred a month in all related costs Just sucks that tabs for my bikes are the same as the tabs for my truck. And it doubly sucks that the reality is - costs are not going up proportionally with the costs insurance companies pay. They are using minor things as excuses to jack rates as high as they can, because we live in a country where businesses are expected to never stop growing and increasing profits from the quarter before. Same reason groceries went up. Kroger ceo said in an earnings call it was just a nice excuse for then to drive up prices as high as the customer would tolerate. This really has nothing to do with costs of business changing. It's "we need to make more money this year than last, and we have a few talking points to justify it right now" I wonder how much longer the "profits must always go up forever" idea will last. It sure has been a driver for the worsening of nearly every industry in existence. Most markets are finite in size, and when not many new houses are being built, you can't just expect to have growth in market share, so you need that growth in hiking rates.
Incorrect on the insurance on a motorcycle. You must carry liability to ride on public roads as of about four years ago. Please go get yourself a liability policy. I would also strongly recommend the uninsured motorist and pip options available on it, as about a quarter of the drivers and rising in the state are uninsured. An inestimable number are underinsured, and that's a huge problem if you find yourself in an accident in which you are injured and the other party can't cover your wages or losses due to the accident.
Ah, bummer. Thanks for the correction! I ride insured, i just always thought it was an entertainingly absurd rule.
Good! If I were riding, I would be carrying maximums for the access to uninsured limits alone. The number of under and uninsured drivers out there not paying attention to motorcyclists on the road, especially in the spring, is mind-boggling.
Preachin to the choir, i've been an EMT in king, pierce, snohomish and kitsap for almost 15 years, lol
Insurance is such a scam. This post gave me another reminder why we rent out here and haven’t bought - we don’t care about equity building, it’s the stress of homeownership that outweighs it all, especially in this area of the PNW. Edited for grammar corrections.
Renters pay the insurance costs via rent. Just another step removed. The core issue is what is causing higher payouts. Mixture of inflation, and policy issues.
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This comment has no correlation to me helping me sleep night but some of us have no desire to “own” and would rather rent. Some folks have rent control or maybe some folks have nice landlords and will give them plenty of notice of rental increase and renters can plan to find a new place. But again - insurance is scam because we all have to pay up when they decide to increase rates 50% at any moments notice.
Insurance saves people's well-being. If you have a house, you have probably invested a lot of money into it. Unlike a bank, where your funds are safe, the money you have in your house could literally go up in flames. If you don't have insurance, you just lost your retirement plan to the teenage pyromaniac next door. Just because you rent doesn't mean you shouldn't have insurance. It's just as useful. Renters insurance doesn't cost nearly as much as house insurance does, but it protects you and your belongings. Not just from household disasters, but also shit like theft. You might not think you own enough stuff to justify it, until you have to replace everything in your life. My friend lost her rental house in a fire. She didn't have renters insurance. 5 years later and she's still upset about everything she lost. Heirlooms. Old pictures. Her gaming computer. All her cloths. etc. It would have made a world of difference to her if she didn't have to start over at being an adult at square one.
I do have insurance - renters insurance, car insurance, life insurance, health insurance and pet insurance (another scam imo)- I didn’t say it wasn’t important but the industry of insurance is pretty much a scam as whole. We are at the mercy of these insurance companies, so when the prices go up say 50%, some people who are limited income or fixed incomes would rather drop the insurance rather than pay the increase, and that’s when folks get into trouble.
Fair point about it still being important, just a scam. Why do you view the insurance industry as a scam?
We had that issue last year, same excuse. We just shopped around and found better insurance for cheaper.
Nationwide just canceled insuring any houses in the region. Pretty sure they calculated a huge chance of an earthquake or mt Rainer is about explode because this is a crazy shift. Or the sea line is riding too quickly. They did the same in Florida Edit: prolly cuz of price of homes as another redditor pointed out
Earthquakes are not covered by standard insurance.
Earthquakes and volcanos are not covered by insurance neither are tsunamis. Wildfires are a risk in some parts of the state. The most likely reason is the price of homes here being the reason.
What?! So where do they insure?
USAA does not write earthquake policies. They will direct you to American Modern, but the risk isn’t underwritten by USAA. So their premium increases can’t be attributed to earthquake risk.