Navigating Florida’s Home Insurance Maze
How a Personalized AI Assistant Could Save You from Bureaucratic Nightmares and Manipulative Sales Tactics
Living in Florida can be wonderful (except during the dreadfully hot Summer months), but there are certainly some disadvantages. The biggest one of them being the extreme weather to which we are often “treated”, especially during the hurricane season. That’s one of the main reasons why home insurance here is exorbitantly expensive, and there are many Florida-specific rules about how to get it and even how you can be passed from one insurance company to another without your explicit consent (you can still “opt out” out of the transfer apparently, but that’s another hassle.) Anyways, we are relatively new to the state, and we are still figuring it all out.
A few weeks ago we got a mailer that was offering to reduce the cost of our home insurance. The mailer seemed to be very targeted to us, since it knew our address, properties of our house, and many other details that would be publicly available about our property. And it quoted an insurance price that was less than half of what we are currently paying. It also provided a very easy way to contact them, via both a a website and phone number. The deadline for renewing our insurance was quickly approaching, but this opportunity seemed too good to pass on. So we filled an online form with our inquiry and contact information. A few days passed, and no one was getting back in touch with us. So we called them up and got someone to talk to. At this point the quote for insurance increased to about 75% of our current insurance. Fine, I’ve been around long enough to know that the quotes you get in the mailer are almost always a fake way to entice you to get to talk to the sales representatives. The problem was that we are now a day before our old insurance is about to expire, and we needed to make sure that we were covered. The new insurance company, however, insisted that they send someone to inspect our house, for a fee of course. We mentioned that by the time the inspection was finished our current insurance would have lapse, but they insisted that was not a big deal. So we agreed to that.
A couple of days later the inspector came by. Our house is in a good shape, fairly new roof, and no other issues whatsoever, so the inspection was a nonevent. However, once the new insurance company got the report, the new quote that they gave us was substantially higher, now close to 90% of our current insurance. And that’s where my BS detector went into overdrive. We decided not to go with the new insurance company, but to stick with the old one. In the end there were just too many red flags for my laking. The new company a) was hard to get in touch with when we actually wanted to give them our business. That’s a major red flag: what would they be like if we need to get a payment for any kind of damage in a case of a disaster? b) The price on the flyer was substantially lower than the one we were initially given over the phone, c) they made us go through an extra inspection hassle, d) they were disingenuous about not having to worry about being late with the renewal, and e) the final price that they quoted seemed to be designed in such a way to just be smaller enough that we would be willing to switch. In other words, we were being manipulated.
Now, shady and duplicitous sales tactics are nothing new. But the problem is that modern life is getting increasingly complicated, especially in the US, with all sorts of rules, regulation, and industry-scale grifts that are designed to squeeze you any way they can. If you want to keep your life as simple as possible, avoid all sorts of regulatory pitfalls, abide by various obscure rules and regulations, and actually save money in the process, you end up doing enough work for another full time job! Most people don’t have the time and energy to dedicate to all of that. Or the resources to hire a high-end personal assistant to manage it all. Which is why managing your life could be a perfect use case for a powerful personalized AI assistant.
Imagine the above scenario of shopping for home insurance, only this time I have an autonomous AI assistant do it all for me. This assistant would start looking into home insurance companies months in advance. It would do all the necessary research: gather the information about our property, various laws and regulations that are relevant in our municipality, all the relevant information about the insurance companies, read all the online reviews, and even make a few information gathering phone calls on our behalf (!!!). It would be able to detect BS, both from the online documents and from the phone conversations. It would be extremely biased in our favor. It would consult with us along the way if necessary. Or, if that is our preference, come up with all the insights and decisions on its own. Such an assistant would go a long way towards freeing us from the clutches of the modern hyper bureaucratized life, and give us back a big chunk of our sanity and peace of mind. It would be a great example of technology helping us become less beholden to the mechanistic world that we’ve grown into.