Where in the world am I today?: North Vancouver, BC, Canada
Got another email from Bob Cates recently with a question about insurance… I sometime scratch my head and wonder if he’s the only guy who reads this blog as he seems like the only guy to comment and make specific requests about content… If anyone else is out there reading this thing and actually has an idea they’d like to share or a topic that they’d like discussed I’d love to hear from you as coming up with content daily can at times be a bit of a challenge…
Anyway, this is the inquiry I got from Bob –
After reading about David Kaplan’s loss, (theft), I’m wondering if you have insurance your props and/or laptop?
I had everything insured, through state farm (which had everything else such as home and auto), but a few years back after review, let it go, because it was costing me like $1600/year! $150 / month seamed like too much. I rationalized that in just two years without loss, I’d save $3200 (after tax dollars) which would be well over $4000 before tax dollars.
So I did a personal risk analysis and decided that if I had some thing stolen (like my $225 ipod was 3 years ago), it would more than likely be a single object such as my laptop, ipod, wireless mic etc. And that if it was, it would likely be less than that aforementioned money I’d save over 2 years.
Two years later, I’m ahead in that I haven’t had a loss and have an extra 4 grand in my pocket so to speak.
The weakest point of the plan, is in the case of a huge loss of course. Such as if my vehicle crashed when full, or someone broke in and took everything such as in your friend’s case.
My question is: do you know of any affordable insurance?
Here’s what I wrote back –
The short answer is that I’ve got a home insurance policy through BCAA that covers my personal stuff then a business rider that comes with a $500.00 deductible on it that costs me $244.00 a year… Cheap in comparison to what you used to pay…
I can also state for the record that I have collected on this policy. A few years back when I was living in a condo before moving to the house I’m now in my condo’s storage locker was broken into and a whole ton of stuff was taken both personal and business related… Now because this fell on both sides of the equation being both ‘personal items’ and ‘business items’ I ended up having to pay two deductibles which sort of sucked, but what’cha gonna do?
Information about the home based business rider available from BCAA is available at the bottom of this page –
For those outside of British Columbia, I’d check the CAA (for the rest of canada) and the AAA in the united States to see if they have a similar policy. Other countries may also have similar arrangements via their automobile clubs, I’m not sure.
