I’ll admit that I should have known better.
Several years ago my son purchased a comprehensive auto policy from Progressive Insurance. It didn’t end well for him.
You know the company — they saturate the air waves with their advertisements featuring Flo the lead insurance agent, Jamie the comic relief guy, and a regular cast of characters working hard to convince you to buy an insurance policy from them. Their ads emphasize how much money you can save with gimmicks such as the “Name Your Price” tool, where you tell them how much you can afford to pay for insurance coverage. What the ads fail to tell the buyer is that Progressive screws their policy holders when it comes time to pay a claim.
Like I said, my son bought a comprehensive policy for his car. The word comprehensive has a special meaning: includes all or everything. You can buy liability insurance that only pays for the other driver’s car in the event of an accident and doesn’t pay for damages to your own car, or you can buy collision insurance, that pays for both cars in an accident. Comprehensive insurance is supposed to be the “kitchen sink” of insurance policies and include uninsured motorist as well as liability and collision.
However, when another driver forced my son off the road and it totaled his car, Progressive refused to pay. Why? According to the claims adjuster, comprehensive coverage doesn’t include collision insurance.
Which is insane. My son lost ten thousand dollars he couldn’t afford to lose. It was a terrible experience and I felt bad for my son.
And in retrospect, I had reason to believe that Progressive Insurance wasn’t the best insurance company when it came to paying claims on their automobile policies. But when we bought our most recent house last April, the closing attorney noted that the insurance premium we’d been quoted was more than double what we should be paying. We were left scrambling to find new coverage in a hurry, and in our haste we purchased homeowner’s coverage from Progressive Insurance.
BIG mistake.
Hurricane Helene came through my new city, less than six months after we bought our most recent house. We had a number of very tall pine trees in our yard, nine to be exact. Four of them fell. Fortunately, none hit our house, but one of my trees made a direct hit on my neighbor’s house.
Our fence was badly damaged, and windows on the front of our house were broken. We lost power for over a week, and the food in both our refrigerator and freezer spoiled. Our total damages were quite expensive: we lost over $1,000 worth of food alone. The broken windows cost almost $4,000 to replace, and we ultimately spent over $10,000 having additional trees removed because the remaining pine trees left standing after the hurricane had suffered severe damage and needed to be removed as well.
We had received an estimate from a local handyman company for $1,000 to repair our fence (we have two large dogs and thus fence integrity is very important), and I foolishly shared that information with our claims adjuster. The actual repairs were over $2,300.
Conservatively, our losses from Hurricane Helene were around $11,000. We actually spent around $18,000 because we decided to bite the bullet and get rid of all the large pine trees around our house, even the one that might have survived more than a year.
The total check from Progressive Insurance to cover all those damages: a little over $1,800.
In other words, they didn’t even pay the full value of having the fence repaired. We received nothing for the spoiled food and nothing for the downed trees. Zero, zip, nada. They allowed for enough money to repair the fence but then they applied the $1,000 deductible and threw in a few bucks for the broken windows, so the end result was that we didn’t even get enough money from the insurance to fully pay for the fence repairs.
As it happens, we now live in a city with lots of extended family who also suffered losses from the hurricane, and we’ve been able to compare notes. As a general rule, the insurance companies don’t pay full value for tree removal unless your driveway is blocked or a tree actually hits your house. However, everybody else in our family received at least $1,000 from their insurance company to help with tree removal. We were the only ones who received nothing for downed trees, even though our front door was completely blocked — if only the tree had fallen over our driveway instead.
I haven’t taken a full poll of the entire family on losses due to spoiled food but my wife did and confirmed we’re the only ones who got totally shafted by their insurance company in that area, too.
In summary, I never expected to emerge unscathed by the storm. I knew Helene was going to cost us money. What I didn’t expect was that a company as big as Progressive would screw over their policy holders after such a devastating storm, or that I would be insulted by their settlement offer.
Learn from our mistake! NEVER buy any kind of policy from Progressive Insurance. They’ll take your money, but when it comes time to give some of it back as payment on a claim, you’ll get nothing.
Speak Your Mind