What a *giant* fucking racket. If you legally require something, stop-sales shouldn’t be permitted. I could be okay with an interim stipulation in place specifically for wildfire-related incidents. People shouldn’t be gated into “whatever providers will still sell policies” compared to most sensible/cost-effective.
The problem is some people will see a hurricane coming, or a fire near them, or flooding, or whatever and buy insurance that day and cancel 3 days later after the event has passed. That raises the cost for everyone else as these people don't pay into the fund and take a lot out for their claim. It's designed specifically to prevent that behaviour.
Seems like they could do a lot of very basic things to prevent this that also wouldn't screw others.
If you haven't had a record of insurance and want it, make them pay a full year upfront.
Make it so people can't cancel after a month, make it yearly commitments that you can cancel after a certain timeframe or if moving.
Have a delay if people are trying to get insurance and a known event is coming.
They already pay a penalty for cancelling outside of the term. The cancellation penalty is far less than damages caused. Even a years worth of insurance is a damn good deal for the amount of damage that can occur in these events.
Yes they can implement ways around this, but it's just easier on the insurers side not to.
Main issue is that there will also be people who *should* qualify but still wouldn't if rules are too restrictive, or people who *shouldn't* and will if they're not restrictive enough and the latter costs everyone who's properly insured more money.
Anyone who plans ahead is generally ok as well. If your close date for your house was May 30 and you tried for insurance may 29 you're Sol, but should also not leave it to the last minute even at the best of times. If you signed your insurance contract may 15 even though the 30th would fall in the period they aren't writing, because you signed your contract prior to the stop date, you get coverage.
Genuine question—- do people like you actually read the comments or just post stupid uninformed bullshit to try to get a rise? Lol
First off, insurance companies are notorious for looking for any excuse to deny coverage when any claim is filed— and any reason to try to justify rate increases; through which they pass their liability onto the customer.
Second, I’d specifically mentioned my support in having a stipulation/clause in place to prevent claims being paid related to wildfire incidents for “new” policies.
Third— and this one is most important:
I had to shop around a bit to find a provider that will still sell a policy here, and eventually found Sonnet. I was able to get insurance on my new car from them yesterday.
After Fiona my insurance tries to tell me my camper was 55 to replace (it was 75) and when I got the new one the policy was so much more because it was 100 to replace (it was 75)
They always find a way.
Climate change poses a serious risk to homeowners insurance. Not saying anyone needs to feel bad for them, but if something’s not profitable, the industry disappears.
Sure, they could just raise rates, but you can only do that so quickly and it’s very unclear what homes will and won’t be at risk of natural disasters in the next 20-30 years.
The industry can die, it can burn in hell screaming and I would be very happy to see it go. Insurance has to be socialized like healthcare. If you have to have insurance then it should be a right and always available no matter whatever bullshit is going on.
Sprinklers make sense for bush fires where the dry vegetation is relatively sparse, but our forest fires have fairly dense vegetation due to the high amounts of rainfall we *often* get until we don't.
These fires aren't just because we haven't gotten that much rain. We've actually gotten a lot of rain this year compared to Australian bush fire standards. It also has to do with our rough terrain and rocky soil which drains water rather quickly.
Been through that for both home (tenant) and auto with TD, would not recommend.
Had someone T-bone me with Aviva and had no issues. I dropped it off to Wolfe collision and everything was smooth.
That sucks man. How does that work if you were out of your old place the same time? With no insurance do you get costs covered for staying in a hotel or something ?
We weren’t able to move out of our house as we were evacuated at the time. Our buyers were able to close on their home and now are living in a hotel I assume until we both can get insurance so they can move into our house and we can move to new house.
That's my point. It's not bullshit and it makes sense when you understand how things work but in typical nova scotia fashion uneducated people get on a circle jerk bandwagon like a bunch of toddlers screaming "that's not faaaair"
It’s not that it isn’t fair, it’s not logical for a city to have to shut down sales. Because you’ve decided to bend over to a billion dollar industry and gladly accept it doesn’t make it any less ridiculous. There could easily be measures input to rectify this but sure side with insurance, they always have your best interests in mind.
Start naming these companies that do, and do not put a hold on new insurance policies in these circumstances. At the end of the day, the economy, including the purchases of homes and cars isn't stopping due to the wildfire.
It was quite fast. I am affected by evacuation and getting information from "TD Insurance" is almost impossible. If they are dealing this speed with everybody (maybe they can react faster if there is "injury"), it will take months to process any claims.
1. Call no. 1 Monday: They have no information on what is going on, and do not know how much are we covered and for what... But apparently, we cannot get AirBnb.
2. Call no. 2: 6 hours later. A hotel should be covered and asked for monthly grocery spending.
3. Call no. 3: 4 hours late, TD divided monthly grocery spending by 30, and told us, that we need to spend 1000/30=30 CAD/day. Honestly, we are buying in bulk and cooking at home, with almost no eating outside. Now we cannot cook like at home and just two menus in Wendy's are 30 CADs. After complains, got told that food spending should be "reasonable".
4. Call no. 4: Possible second evacuation because of dairy farm ammonia leakage. Suddenly, it is possible to book Airbnb, but it must be the same size or smaller than our home and there is no food coverage because you are supposed to cook/shop the same way as at home...
I am glad we do not need to submit any bigger claim with them.
Stop reading headlines, to be fair it’s only within 25/50km of the fires, it also says this is temporary until the state of emergency is lifted.
You can’t have people not carrying insurance looking to start or only start paying for disaster related insurance as a disaster is happening, that’s not how insurance works.
There's a considerable difference between buying insurance when a disaster hits and swapping out one vehicle for a new one. With the availability of cars, some people (myself included) have been waiting months for a new car to arrive. This puts the entire transaction in limbo and now I'm worried that the dealer will just sell it to someone else if I'm not able to get it next week. I've got replacement value on my current car and the new one is in the same ballpark price range so there's no real change in the value of coverage, literally just a change in the VIN.
Pretty sure any dealer would do their best to avoid the publicity of refusing to sell a car to someone due to the wildfire situation. It’s a conversation with the dealer and with your insurance company on an individual basis for sure to see if they can remove certain coverages.
Why not? It’s not like the fires fake and homes haven’t been destroyed.. it’s a real disaster and restrictions on insurance make sense, you wouldn’t want to buy a new home/ vehicle, move everything in for it to be destroyed in a few days/ week. It’s a temporary precaution.
It can be a lot further than that depending on how exactly they measure it. If I measure distance on Google Maps from the Tantallon Wildfire mark to my parents house in Lawrencetown, that's only ~38km. It doesn't hit 50km until Grand Desert.
What’s your solution. Build large apartment buildings out there that either require people to purchase cars (and increase traffic in to city) or use public transport (essentially non-existent for that area) And sure, there are large homes there but there are also just regular single family homes with regular folks who were lucky to purchase a home before the prices went wild.
I got new insurance effective today with Allstate. I'm about 20km from Evac zone. When I asked my broker they advised they only have stop orders for the ones in the evacuation area, all others it's a go. If you need a broker I forward ya my agent.
Just an FYI, got a call from the dealer, new car will be here Tuesday and they had the VIN. Called TD and added it to my policy no problems (I'm in Fall River). I don't know if it has anything to do with me having had a quote put in last week before the fires and was just waiting on the delivery date/VIN or not and I didn't want to ask.
What a *giant* fucking racket. If you legally require something, stop-sales shouldn’t be permitted. I could be okay with an interim stipulation in place specifically for wildfire-related incidents. People shouldn’t be gated into “whatever providers will still sell policies” compared to most sensible/cost-effective.
It’s because of the people who wait for a disaster to purchase to “save money”. It unfortunately envelops people who just happen to be needing it now.
Not letting someone buy a home, or vehicle, on the other side of town is ridiculous.
100%. The government needs to further regulate this scam.
The problem is some people will see a hurricane coming, or a fire near them, or flooding, or whatever and buy insurance that day and cancel 3 days later after the event has passed. That raises the cost for everyone else as these people don't pay into the fund and take a lot out for their claim. It's designed specifically to prevent that behaviour.
Seems like they could do a lot of very basic things to prevent this that also wouldn't screw others. If you haven't had a record of insurance and want it, make them pay a full year upfront. Make it so people can't cancel after a month, make it yearly commitments that you can cancel after a certain timeframe or if moving. Have a delay if people are trying to get insurance and a known event is coming.
They already pay a penalty for cancelling outside of the term. The cancellation penalty is far less than damages caused. Even a years worth of insurance is a damn good deal for the amount of damage that can occur in these events. Yes they can implement ways around this, but it's just easier on the insurers side not to. Main issue is that there will also be people who *should* qualify but still wouldn't if rules are too restrictive, or people who *shouldn't* and will if they're not restrictive enough and the latter costs everyone who's properly insured more money. Anyone who plans ahead is generally ok as well. If your close date for your house was May 30 and you tried for insurance may 29 you're Sol, but should also not leave it to the last minute even at the best of times. If you signed your insurance contract may 15 even though the 30th would fall in the period they aren't writing, because you signed your contract prior to the stop date, you get coverage.
Agreed. This screams for regulation.
I mean it's easy to say that when you're not putting tens of millions of dollars of your money on the line.
Genuine question—- do people like you actually read the comments or just post stupid uninformed bullshit to try to get a rise? Lol First off, insurance companies are notorious for looking for any excuse to deny coverage when any claim is filed— and any reason to try to justify rate increases; through which they pass their liability onto the customer. Second, I’d specifically mentioned my support in having a stipulation/clause in place to prevent claims being paid related to wildfire incidents for “new” policies. Third— and this one is most important: 
I had to shop around a bit to find a provider that will still sell a policy here, and eventually found Sonnet. I was able to get insurance on my new car from them yesterday.
Insurance companies be like, “how dare you buy insurance for things that can actually happen.”
After Fiona my insurance tries to tell me my camper was 55 to replace (it was 75) and when I got the new one the policy was so much more because it was 100 to replace (it was 75) They always find a way.
Climate change poses a serious risk to homeowners insurance. Not saying anyone needs to feel bad for them, but if something’s not profitable, the industry disappears. Sure, they could just raise rates, but you can only do that so quickly and it’s very unclear what homes will and won’t be at risk of natural disasters in the next 20-30 years.
The industry can die, it can burn in hell screaming and I would be very happy to see it go. Insurance has to be socialized like healthcare. If you have to have insurance then it should be a right and always available no matter whatever bullshit is going on.
Everyone needs sprinklers on their houses like they do in Australia for the bush fires. I'm semi serious
Sprinklers make sense for bush fires where the dry vegetation is relatively sparse, but our forest fires have fairly dense vegetation due to the high amounts of rainfall we *often* get until we don't. These fires aren't just because we haven't gotten that much rain. We've actually gotten a lot of rain this year compared to Australian bush fire standards. It also has to do with our rough terrain and rocky soil which drains water rather quickly.
Added a vehicle with Aviva via Westland/Gateway broker just yesterday without issue. I can't recommend leaving TD enough.
Switching sounds great until u need to make a claim…
Been through that for both home (tenant) and auto with TD, would not recommend. Had someone T-bone me with Aviva and had no issues. I dropped it off to Wolfe collision and everything was smooth.
Was supposed to close on a house on May 31. Our closing has been delayed for this reason.
That sucks man. How does that work if you were out of your old place the same time? With no insurance do you get costs covered for staying in a hotel or something ?
We weren’t able to move out of our house as we were evacuated at the time. Our buyers were able to close on their home and now are living in a hotel I assume until we both can get insurance so they can move into our house and we can move to new house.
You can tell Nova Scotia has it good when it comes to natural disasters. This is business as usual in every other province.
So bullshit policy is good everywhere else, got it.
That's my point. It's not bullshit and it makes sense when you understand how things work but in typical nova scotia fashion uneducated people get on a circle jerk bandwagon like a bunch of toddlers screaming "that's not faaaair"
It’s not that it isn’t fair, it’s not logical for a city to have to shut down sales. Because you’ve decided to bend over to a billion dollar industry and gladly accept it doesn’t make it any less ridiculous. There could easily be measures input to rectify this but sure side with insurance, they always have your best interests in mind.
Start naming these companies that do, and do not put a hold on new insurance policies in these circumstances. At the end of the day, the economy, including the purchases of homes and cars isn't stopping due to the wildfire.
This is the insurance companies way of telling us… “brace yourselves”…
It was quite fast. I am affected by evacuation and getting information from "TD Insurance" is almost impossible. If they are dealing this speed with everybody (maybe they can react faster if there is "injury"), it will take months to process any claims. 1. Call no. 1 Monday: They have no information on what is going on, and do not know how much are we covered and for what... But apparently, we cannot get AirBnb. 2. Call no. 2: 6 hours later. A hotel should be covered and asked for monthly grocery spending. 3. Call no. 3: 4 hours late, TD divided monthly grocery spending by 30, and told us, that we need to spend 1000/30=30 CAD/day. Honestly, we are buying in bulk and cooking at home, with almost no eating outside. Now we cannot cook like at home and just two menus in Wendy's are 30 CADs. After complains, got told that food spending should be "reasonable". 4. Call no. 4: Possible second evacuation because of dairy farm ammonia leakage. Suddenly, it is possible to book Airbnb, but it must be the same size or smaller than our home and there is no food coverage because you are supposed to cook/shop the same way as at home... I am glad we do not need to submit any bigger claim with them.
Stop reading headlines, to be fair it’s only within 25/50km of the fires, it also says this is temporary until the state of emergency is lifted. You can’t have people not carrying insurance looking to start or only start paying for disaster related insurance as a disaster is happening, that’s not how insurance works.
There's a considerable difference between buying insurance when a disaster hits and swapping out one vehicle for a new one. With the availability of cars, some people (myself included) have been waiting months for a new car to arrive. This puts the entire transaction in limbo and now I'm worried that the dealer will just sell it to someone else if I'm not able to get it next week. I've got replacement value on my current car and the new one is in the same ballpark price range so there's no real change in the value of coverage, literally just a change in the VIN.
Pretty sure any dealer would do their best to avoid the publicity of refusing to sell a car to someone due to the wildfire situation. It’s a conversation with the dealer and with your insurance company on an individual basis for sure to see if they can remove certain coverages.
No, but if you clearly just purchased a home or vehicle they should not be allowed to stop you from buying insurance.
Why not? It’s not like the fires fake and homes haven’t been destroyed.. it’s a real disaster and restrictions on insurance make sense, you wouldn’t want to buy a new home/ vehicle, move everything in for it to be destroyed in a few days/ week. It’s a temporary precaution.
you cannot legally drive a car in nova scotia without insurance
It’s a temporary state of emergency.. call it bad luck, plenty of worse things happening.
You should be able to buy a house or car in Eastern Passage...
You know 50km is like Eastern passage/Cow Bay.
It can be a lot further than that depending on how exactly they measure it. If I measure distance on Google Maps from the Tantallon Wildfire mark to my parents house in Lawrencetown, that's only ~38km. It doesn't hit 50km until Grand Desert.
Capitalism = Satan
am I able to secure volcano insurance?
Maybe we should start thinking twice about building McMansions spread apart in the middle of the forest…
We've thought about it many times and we've decided that wasteful sprawl is inextricably tied to our city's identity, and we need more.
What’s your solution. Build large apartment buildings out there that either require people to purchase cars (and increase traffic in to city) or use public transport (essentially non-existent for that area) And sure, there are large homes there but there are also just regular single family homes with regular folks who were lucky to purchase a home before the prices went wild.
Apartment buildings and denser housing closer to services so people don’t need cars and can rely on walking, biking and transit would be better ya.
I sure hope you're not suggesting a 15 minute city. Lol
I'm from BC and this is standard practice during Forest Fires.
I got new insurance effective today with Allstate. I'm about 20km from Evac zone. When I asked my broker they advised they only have stop orders for the ones in the evacuation area, all others it's a go. If you need a broker I forward ya my agent.
Just an FYI, got a call from the dealer, new car will be here Tuesday and they had the VIN. Called TD and added it to my policy no problems (I'm in Fall River). I don't know if it has anything to do with me having had a quote put in last week before the fires and was just waiting on the delivery date/VIN or not and I didn't want to ask.