News

Happy Tax Day! Yes it is true. Today is tax day 2011 (as I am sure you know by now). I was a little thrown off myself this year– we are so pre-programmed for April 15th. Thanks to Emancipation Day, an official holiday in the District of Columbia, the whole country got a bye. I have a better idea though - for every day past the deadline for passing a national budget, we should get an extra day for filing our taxes. Makes sense to me. 

 

I suppose you get as infuriated as I do when you hear about debt ceilings and deficits. While I know there is no easy answer to our financial woes, I do wish our government would learn to cope with belt- tightening just as most of us have. You can’t continuously spend more than you take in and think it will never catch up with you – am I right or am I right?

 

What would you do if 40% of your income had to go to creditors to pay just the interest on the debt you had outstanding? How could you compete as a business owner if $.40 of every dollar of revenue you brought in had to go directly to someone holding your debt? Only in the case of the government are they philosophically ‘un-defaultable’ so no one stops them from going further in the hole. I get the fact that there is a much bigger picture than the one I am able to see, but I can’t understand why our leaders in government can’t be honest enough to have that frank & difficult conversation or lead us with a unified vision towards financial security. Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to do my part and send my check.

 

In the meantime, I plan to help the economy by selling even more specialty insurance products! One of the best ways to fulfill our professional responsibility to policyholders is to give them the best coverage options and to educate them so they can make the right choice. Here is a good example of what I am talking about. 

 

The Tuscano Agency has been writing Vacant Property for many years. In fact, we are very good at it – the pricing is great, we offer a lot of coverage options, and we make it extremely easy to get a quote and bind coverage (aka our online rater). Over the years, at least 50% of the claims we have received that are not covered for the owner of a vacant property are a result of water damage from burst pipes or theft (again, of the copper pipes). This is because most policyholders just choose basic form coverage. At Tuscano, we have been offering special form coverage as an option for several years and I am sorry to say it rarely sells. For as little as $50 more, policyholders could have the ‘full coverage’ option and those water damage and theft losses would be covered. Please, even if you cannot steer your insured toward making the wise choice, be sure to at least give them the option.

 

Now, how can we do this for our government?