Free Useful Information For Your Life

Look out your car window and, sometimes, between the billboards, you can see a tree. In the good old days before we started covering the land with concrete, there used to be whole forests. Now the trees are gone and the ground is covered up, all we get are floods – the water can no longer soak into the ground and disappear. Of course, some of us keep trees as pets in our yards. We miss the old times and enjoy watching something big and green growing up into the sky. And yet. . . Have you ever wondered what holds the trees upright? Yes, these wonders of nature do grow up into the sky but, to ensure they don’t just fall over every time the wind blows, they develop big root systems. Many of these roots spread underneath our homes and can cause problems with the foundations. Some roots go the other way and produce that delightfully uneven sidewalk our old folk like to trip over when their eyesight’s not so good.

If the roots from one of your trees produces cracks in your neighbor’s home, or a stranger passing by falls over a cracked sidewalk, you can face a claim. This will usually be covered under the liability section of the policy. You can also face enforcement action from your local council. Local laws usually entitle the council to order you to remove “dangerous” trees and make good the sidewalk. If you refuse, the council can come on to your land, remove the tree and send you the bill. Whoever’s responsible for maintaining the road outside your home is likely to have similar powers. Completely removing a large tree can be an expensive business. Unfortunately, your insurance policy only covers you when your trees cause loss or damage to others. It does not pay out for preventive work to cut back the branches or roots. You get to pay the tree surgeon to do that out of your own savings. Read the rest of this entry »

The problem with insurance is nothing in life is ever completely certain. One day the housing market can be rolling along, everyone certain prices can only ever go up. The next day, we’re pitched into a recession, major banks are in trouble and the housing market has collapsed. Because insurance is based on the concept of good faith, there’s supposed to be give and take on both sides of the relationship. An insurer cannot physically inspect every property it agrees to cover. To some extent, it must always rely on the honesty of the home owner to get proper estimates for the cost of rebuilding. After all, if the owner innocently underinsures, he or she will have to pay the additional costs out of savings. The insurer will not be at risk. If there was fraud, the insurer has the right to cancel the policy and avoid any payment. This protection for the insurer is fairly comprehensive. Hence, to offer better balance, most insurers offer guaranteed or extended replacement cover cover.

The point of this cover is simple. No matter how hard you try, no pre-estimate of the cost of rebuilding is ever absolute. It’s only when you get on the ground and start work you find out what all the problems are going to be. Costs have an unfortunate habit of rising and it’s relatively common for owners to have to sacrifice features of their old home to get the building work finished within budget. But, if you’re prepared to pay about 10% more on the premium rate, you can buy guaranteed cover, i.e. the insurer will pay the actual cost. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s one unchanging fact when running a business. No matter what the size, you cannot separate the business from its market. It’s for the owner to identify the market niche and sell to it consistently enough to generate a profit. Should something happen to disturb the confidence among the customers/clients, there’s a real risk the business may be lost. This is the current problem for small businesses across America. Although we may have emerged from the recession as a matter of technical accounting at a federal level, there’s a continuing loss of confidence in the markets. At first, the average person cut down on discretionary spending and took action to reduce indebtedness. This significantly reduced buying power and the majority of businesses had to respond by cutting staff. For this reason, unemployment has remained over 9% for the last three years. In fact, the actual number of unemployed is far higher because the federal statistics only count the number of people claiming benefit and, unless market sentiment picks up significantly, unemployment is likely to remain high for the foreseeable future.

However, cutting overheads by reducing staff is a difficult balancing act because of the unemployment insurance (UI) costs. UI is a program to pay cash to those who lose their jobs. It’s jointly administered by the federal and state governments. In theory, it’s a program based on the notion of fairness. If a business terminates an employee, that business owes a responsibility to cushion the loss of pay while the ex-employee seeks alternate employment. Except, the rise in UI costs has made the economics of dismissal difficult. UI is a tax based on three factors: the size of the payroll, the amount the business has paid into as UI, and the amount claimed from that UI fund. So if a business is proposing to terminate a fairly senior employee of long-standing, the business should consider what claim this employee might make for benefit. Even one claim can result in a tax increase of several thousand dollars. Read the rest of this entry »

According to the Book of Common Prayer we often leave undone the things we ought to have done. It’s a fact of life. In many ways, we are our own worst enemies. Yet, for most everyday purposes, there are no penalties. We do the things we left undone when we have the time. We might never actually catch up with the backlog, but we keep moving forward. Except there are times when the failure produces instant consequences and, no matter how hard we try, it’s impossible to go back and put it right. Let’s be clear about this. The majority of traffic accidents could be avoided if everyone followed the rules of the road and kept a proper lookout. But we are easily distracted, multitasking when we should focus on the driving. This leaves the insurance companies with a bill and a problem.

In a no-fault state, it does not matter whether the insured driver or the others involved were negligent. The insurance company pays out regardless. But this only applies in twelve states. The remainder rely on the law of tort which order the party at fault to pay compensation to the other. So, if you were not at fault, your insurance company collects the compensation from the other driver and, in theory, suffers no loss. But if the other driver was not insured or underinsured, or you were at fault, your insurer now faces a loss. If this was just down to the math, the insurer would calculate a “fair” premium rate increase and slowly recover the loss. But if the insurer put up the rate every time one of its drivers was at fault, many of those drivers would move to a competing company. So the math has to bend to match social considerations. Sometimes, the insurers have to accept the loss. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone knows about the professional criminals who are now working up and down the country to bilk insurers out of their money. They stage accidents, fake injuries and receive several billion dollars a year for their trouble. Why, you ask, do they get away with this. The answer comes in two parts. The first is at state level. As you might have noticed, almost all states are running deficits and are under pressure to find savings – for some reason, no state wants to be seen raising taxes. This means even essential services are being cut. So when it comes to law enforcement, where does a Police Chief spend his reduced budget? What are the priorities? Well, we all want to feel safe so a focus on violent crimes like robbery and burglary wins votes in the election. So-called white collar crime takes a back seat. That means local police forces only investigate fraud when it’s really serious, i.e. there’s a lot of media coverage. The FBI are interested in anything crossing state lines and there is a task force set up to deal with insurance fraud. But this is a drop in the ocean when you consider how many billion dollars are involved every year.

The second reason is that you are not exactly overjoyed by the prospect of better fraud detection. Just imagine the sequence of events. Insurance companies have to recruit and train investigators to work alongside claims adjusters. This immediately boosts the insurer’s costs which get passed on to you in higher premium rates. Now all these eager-beaver investigators finish their training and they are released on to the current files. Suddenly everything slows down as these investigators decide whether there’s anything fishy about your claim. How long are you going to put up with someone poking around your claim to decide whether you really did suffer whiplash in that accident? At what point do you start complaining? It’s possible, of course, that these investigators may detect real fraud. If so, the savings they make could start paying their salaries and the premium rates would come down. Well that’s the theory, anyway, and we can all dream. Read the rest of this entry »

The problem can be stated simply. If you take your eyes off the road, you will not see the other vehicle coming toward you. This makes you a danger to other road users. The group most likely to fall into this trap are young drivers. Not only are they the least experienced behind the wheel. They are also the ones with the most peer pressure to reply to the text message or answer the cell phone call immediately. The evidence cannot be more clear. Looking at all the different ways in which teens die through disease and accidents, crashes in motor-vehicles are the leading cause of death. The government estimates that, in 2009, about 5,500 people were killed and more than half-a-million injured because one of the drivers was distracted.

In a perfect world, this would be resolved by a discussion at home. As a parent, you would sit down with your children and explain the risks. The statistics are available on the internet to back up your warnings. Your children would nod their heads wisely and swear by all they hold holy not to continue this dangerous practice. Except this would not work in most families. What teens say to their parents is not how they act when they are outside the home. So now comes the hard choice. Do you sit back and rely on prayer every time they drive off into the wild blue yonder, or do you take positive steps? First, a little law: it’s a criminal offense to operate any transmitter that will block or jam wireless communications. So you would face big fines if you were found jamming mobile phone signals. But it’s probably not an offense if you instal equipment in your vehicle that acts as a passive block to the signal. The reason for the distinction is that if you created a cone of silence around your vehicle by transmitting a signal to jam all the cell towers, you would cut off all the other users in your area. While this might make the roads safer, it would seriously inconvenience everyone else. More importantly, it might interfere with emergency calls for the police and ambulance. So passive shielding is probably legal because it does not interfere with any other vehicle or person on the sidewalk. Taking this simple step means you no longer have trust issues with your teen (until he or she works out how to turn it off or get round the shielding, e.g. by putting an antenna outside the vehicle). Read the rest of this entry »

Having a car involves many responsibilities, some of which may be not as pleasant as driving a car and involve additional costs. Yes, we are talking about vehicle insurance. It’s definitely one of the most irritating aspects of owning a car and a cash-consuming one. Ask any driver and he will tell you that his or her insurance could be less expensive, since it takes a good bite off the family budget. If you are in the same situations as millions of drivers in the country and want your car to be not as expensive to insure as it is now the following money saving tips will definitely help you optimize your costs effectively:

Modify your policy

Vehicle insurance comes in many forms and delivers many options to choose from. When there are many different coverage options included into your policy it becomes very expensive. So your aim when optimizing your insurance costs is to strip off all the unnecessary coverage features and leave only those that are really needed. In fact, the only type of coverage that is legally required is the third party liability whereas all others are optional. Sure, it doesn’t mean that you have to strip down your policy to the bare minimums. But make sure to take some time and think about the things you really need with your policy and things you can leave behind. This will certainly cut your insurance costs effectively. Read the rest of this entry »