Re: Pearls Before Swine: Uncle At The Door

On Sun, 12 Jan 2025, William Hyde wrote:

Scott Lurndal wrote:

William Hyde <wthyde1953@gmail.com> writes:

Dimensional Traveler wrote:

On 1/11/2025 8:54 AM, Paul S Person wrote:

On Fri, 10 Jan 2025 14:48:19 -0800, Bobbie Sellers
<bliss-sf4ever@dslextreme.com> wrote:
 

 

    So Southern California should be abandoned by all but the
entertainment industry and the retirees should move to Florida.:^(

 Florida is out -- retirees are fleeing because of the high condo fees,
or some such nonsense.
 Well, according to /some/ online sources, anyway.

 High insurance costs for all the beachfront buildings that are starting
to subside because of rising sea levels and the resulting knock-on
effects from that like insurance companies refusing to add new policies
or renew existing ones because doing so would endanger their profits.

 People in the reinsurance industry started paying attention to the
problem of climate change a long time ago.  At about the turn of the
century two big ones, Munich Re and Swiss Re, decided to stop offering
coverage on the US gulf coast.  Others simply put up prices. As
insurance companies rely on re-insurers to take some of the risk
companies had to raise rates to preserve profits.
 I'd be surprised if something similar hasn't happened in fire-prone
areas.  Insurance companies are not in the business of saving people,
they are in the business of spreading risk and making pots of money in
the process.

 There are mutual insurers (such as state farm) where the
risk is spread over the pool of insured with premiums adjusted
appropriately.  Excess premium dollars would be returned to the
insured annually.  Although State Farm hasn't been able to return
anything for a decade or more IME.

>
As I recall there were far more mutual firms about thirty years ago. Many demutualized, with the policy holders getting shares in the new company.  It was similar to the case of S&Ls  a decade or so earlier but at least in the case of my family's insurer, Canada Life, it was handled well.
>
A guess at the insured cost of the current fires is 20 billion, but I'm sure that will go up.  And total cost is much higher.
>
William Hyde

This is very interesting. In sweden, credit unions have almost completely vanished as well. This is sad, because as a business owner, my two enemies are the government and my bank. So I often thought that it would be nice to move my stuff to a credit union, but only one remains, and it is located in the other end of the country, so they are sadly not too keen on taking on customers from everywhere, but are very much locally anchored to regional farmers and people who live close by.