Sensible Insurance PNW has been here five years, and besides being grateful, it has me in a reflective mood about how Sensible has developed.
Claims Paid
Our insurance carriers have paid well over $1 million worth of claims for our clients. Our insurers don’t do this out of the goodness of their hearts, they do this because it’s what our clients have paid them for, for financial help when certain accidents happen. What kind of accidents?
These were claims right here in Hillsboro, Beaverton, Forest Grove, and North Plains. For homes, pipes have burst at $30k+, tree branches smashed roofs at $20k+, windstorms stripped roofs at $60k+, and a fire destroyed a house at $600k+. Car accidents have ranged from smaller fender benders in the thousands, to totaled vehicles at $70k+, to harrowing head on collisions with significant injuries at $130k+ because the other driver only had minimal coverage.
No amount of money can remove the stress and trauma involved in such events, but we’re glad to see our insurers take care of clients in meaningful ways.
Our Carriers for Auto, Home, Earthquake, Umbrellas and Life Insurance
One benefit of being an independent agency is that we can work with different carriers to help with insurance.
Our main three carriers remain Safeco, Travelers, and Progressive. This speaks to the stability, consistency, and options that each one of these carriers delivers. Each carrier has its strengths, usually providing more flexible coverage options than what you’ll find through competitors like State Farm, Allstate, or Farmers– except in the area of earthquake coverage.
This is why we’ve added key options for earthquake risks, Geovera and Palomar. Though you probably haven’t heard their names, these companies have excellent financial ratings (ratings that take into account reinsurance, which is critical for catastrophic events, and one of them has an experienced catastrophic claims team in-house). In addition, their policies provide more flexible coverage options and lower deductibles than you would typically see with big-name carriers like State Farm, Allstate, or Farmers.
Apart from car and home insurance, we think personal liability umbrellas continue to be a relatively inexpensive way of improving personal liability protection. After all, if you’ve worked hard to make an income, to acquire a house, or to grow your assets, you might find it worthwhile to get some more protection from a personal lawsuit, frivolous or not-so-frivolous. With the rising costs of injuries, car repairs and subsequent lawsuits, we believe umbrellas will play a growing role in defending people. We have them available either as part of a bundle or through a standalone option.
Finally, we continue to use Pacific Life to provide term life insurance. Though we do have some other options, Pacific Life’s competitive pricing and application process, not to mention the big frolicking whale, has us coming back. Let us know if you’re curious.
Tech Improvements
We’ve made many tech improvements within our agency. We’ve re-done our website, switched management systems, and added several technologies to help with everything from communications to e-signatures and file retrievals. We favor simplicity and stability over bells and whistles. Likewise with marketing, we prefer quality contact over repeated drip approaches. (We did consider purchasing the Blazers, but it just didn’t fit with our marketing approach. 😉 )
And AI? It will make your wildest dreams come true, if you listen to tech conferences and commercials. We’ll see. The reality is that AI is not one thing. It’s a newish way of computing that is being developed by many different groups into many different tools for many different situations. It’s good at some things, lousy at others, and raises loads of questions along the way.
As for Sensible, we’re open to ideas but expect that these tools will change the marketplace incrementally. Knowing that there are no magic buttons, we want each change we make to help us improve how we work for you.
Major Changes in the Insurance Landscape
We’ve definitely noticed some changes over our past thirteen years in insurance and especially these last five.
Carriers have almost all become more picky with roofs, incorporating aerial imagery into their underwriting toolkit. Here in our part of Oregon, this means giving good attention to our roofs.
Clearing needles, leaves, and debris, cutting back nearby trees, and even replacing our roof before we might want have all become more important. Yes, it can be irritating and expensive, but it does go some ways towards preventing major roof losses, and for that reason, helps stabilize our insurance rates.
Wildfires continue to be a major concern here in Oregon for homeowners and home insurers alike. Home policies do cover wildfire losses up to the policy limits (so make sure you’re comfortable with your limits). Though Oregon’s home insurance pricing remains pretty good compared to other states, we’re seeing higher pricing everywhere. The highest impacts in pricing have been in forested exurban areas, those homes just outside of town on two to fifteen acre lots, homes of which we have plenty here in Washington County.
We’ve also seen the continued growth of direct-to-consumer companies like Geico as well as more adventurous newcomers like Lemonade, a company that promises to revolutionize insurance with AI & bots.
We tested Lemonade out for our own home insurance— curiosity got the best of us!
While their slick interface made it easy to get a quote and easier to take our money, the end result was that the cost was hundreds more than we currently pay and for inferior coverage. We’re certain they’ll keep improving with all the venture capital money they have to cover their ongoing losses. Meanwhile, we would encourage anyone to ignore their advice to “Forget everything you know about insurance.”
Community Support
There are many local organizations here in our area that we’ve been glad to support in some small ways over these past five years. Among them are Buzzy’s Bees, the Refugee Care Collective, Hillsboro Farmers’ Market, Forest Hills Lutheran School, and the Union Gospel Mission. Thank you to all who have a heart to do good work.
People Improvements
Last and not least, my fellow business partner (and partner-partner) Kathryn went through the training to secure her Oregon insurance license. Though she hasn’t been involved in Sensible’s work directly (homeschooling three kids yet!), she continues to be a source of invaluable advice and is well-prepared to step in as needed.
In Sum
The heart of our work remains helping you find and keep good value for your insurance dollars. Thank you.
With care,
Eli