Safenet Insurance Group LLC

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Safenet Insurance Group LLC Born and raised in Davie County. Independent agent, so I work for you, not the carrier. You must talk to an agent directly to alter your policy.**

Safenet Insurance Group, LLC is an independent agency owned and operated by Barry Jones that offers auto insurance, home insurance, business insurance, and life insurance to clients throughout North Carolina.
**Coverages cannot be bound via social media.

10/12/2026

If you rent out a house in North Carolina, your insurance renewal is probably going up. Just not as much as it could have.

Last fall the Rate Bureau asked for 68.3 percent more on dwelling policies, the kind landlords carry on rental houses, spread over two years. The Insurance Commissioner settled it in April at 5 percent this year and 5 percent next year.

That is a statewide average. Your area could land higher or lower. It applies to new and renewal policies starting October 1, 2026, and again October 1, 2027.

Five percent is not the real story, though. The real story is what a lot of rental policies are missing.

A dwelling policy is not a homeowners policy. Depending on the form and what was added, it may not cover your liability if a tenant or a guest gets hurt on the property. It may not cover theft. It may not cover the rent you lose while the house is being repaired.

That last one is the one that hurts. A kitchen fire that takes four months to fix is four months of mortgage with no rent coming in.

Your renewal notice is a good excuse to pull the policy out and look at what is actually on it.

Rent out a property? Comment the county it is in and I will tell you the first thing I would check.

(Source: NCRB Circular P-26-5; NCDOI 4/22/2026)

10/08/2026

Your 17-year-old gets a speeding ticket. Somebody tells you to take a PJC because it keeps the points off your insurance.

That can be good advice. Once.

A Prayer for Judgment Continued is North Carolina's one-time pass. For insurance, it keeps a moving violation from turning into points on your policy. What most families do not know is that the pass is not per driver. It is per household.

The law lets the ticket count against your insurance anyway if the owner, the main driver, or any licensed driver in the household has already used a PJC within the lookback period.

So if Dad used one two years ago, the teenager's PJC may not protect the family policy at all.

The lookback also got longer. For PJCs entered on or after July 1, 2025, insurance companies look back five years instead of three. A PJC used this fall stays in play for the household until 2031.

That changes when you use it. Points on a teenage driver usually cost a family far more than the same points on a parent with a clean record. If there is only one pass in the house, spend it where it saves the most.

This is about insurance only. What the court does with a license is a question for an attorney.

Has anybody in your house used a PJC in the last few years? You do not have to say who. Comment YES or NO and I will tell you what it means for the next ticket.

(Source: G.S. 58-36-75(f); S.L. 2025-45)

10/05/2026

You switched car insurance companies. The new policy started on the 15th. The old one ended on the 12th.

Three days. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got pulled over. A few weeks later a letter from the DMV shows up anyway.

In North Carolina, your insurance company has to tell the DMV when a policy ends. If nothing is on file picking up where the old one stopped, the state treats it as a lapse, even if it was only a long weekend.

One thing just changed in your favor. For notices sent on or after October 1, you get 30 days to respond instead of 10.

Here is what did not change. If you cannot show you were covered, the state revokes the car's registration. The penalty depends on the last three years: $50 if it is your first, $100 for a second, $150 after that. The plate has to go back to the DMV, and not returning it is a Class 2 misdemeanor.

Most lapse letters I see come from one of two things. A switch between companies where the dates did not line up. Or an automatic payment that quietly failed and the cancellation notice went unopened.

Two habits prevent almost all of it.

When you change companies, start the new policy the same day the old one ends. A day early is fine. A day late is not.

If your bank card changed this year, make sure your insurance payment moved with it.

Already holding one of these letters? Comment LETTER and I will help you figure out what it is asking for.

(Source: G.S. 20-311, as amended by S.L. 2026-46)

Somebody rear-ends you. Their insurance repairs your car properly. You are still out thousands of dollars, and most peop...
10/01/2026

Somebody rear-ends you. Their insurance repairs your car properly. You are still out thousands of dollars, and most people never ask for it.

It is called diminished value. Your car got repaired. It did not get un-wrecked. It now carries an accident on its history report, and the next buyer or the next dealer is going to price it accordingly.

A three-year-old vehicle with a clean history and the same vehicle with a reported collision do not sell for the same money. That gap is a real loss you took because somebody else hit you, and in North Carolina you can generally pursue it.

Some hard edges worth knowing.

It is a third-party claim. You make it against the at-fault driver's insurer, not your own. Most policies specifically exclude diminution in value under your own collision coverage. So this only exists when someone else was at fault, and in this state that means clearly at fault, because North Carolina's contributory negligence rule is unforgiving.

The clock is three years from the date of the crash, under the state's three-year limitations period for property damage. That sounds like plenty of time. It goes fast, and nobody sends a reminder.

Nobody will raise it for you. The adjuster's job is to pay for repairs. Diminished value is a separate claim you have to bring up yourself.

It is not worth chasing on every fender bender. If the vehicle is older, low in value, or had prior damage, there may not be much of a gap to recover. It matters most on newer vehicles with real damage and clean prior history.

Proving it generally takes an independent appraisal rather than an opinion. There are appraisers who do nothing else.

I do not handle these claims and I do not get paid if you file one. I am telling you because a lot of people have three years to ask for money they did not know existed, and then they do not ask.

If you were hit in the last three years and the car was reasonably new, it is worth ten minutes of looking into.

If your teenager got their license after July 1, 2025, the inexperienced operator surcharge on your policy now runs eigh...
09/28/2026

If your teenager got their license after July 1, 2025, the inexperienced operator surcharge on your policy now runs eight years instead of three.

That is not a typo, and it is not your carrier being difficult. It is a change in how North Carolina rates new drivers, and it went in quietly alongside the new liability minimums.

The old rule: a driver with less than three years of experience carried the surcharge. Three years in, it came off.

The new rule, for anyone first licensed on or after July 1, 2025: the surcharge applies until they have eight years of driving experience. It steps down across years four through eight instead of ending at three.

So a sixteen-year-old licensed last fall is carrying some version of it until they are about twenty-four.

I want to be fair about what this is. It is not a penalty somebody invented to take your money. Crash rates for drivers under twenty-five are measurably higher, and the old three-year cliff did not reflect that. The step-down at least means it fades rather than falling off all at once.

But it changes the math on a few decisions, and those are worth knowing now instead of in year five.

Whether to keep them on your policy or write their own. A separate policy for a nineteen-year-old loses your multi-car and multi-policy discounts and does not dodge the surcharge. It usually costs more, not less. Run it before you assume.

What they drive. The surcharge is a multiplier. It multiplies whatever the underlying rate on that vehicle happens to be. A cheap-to-insure car is now worth eight years of savings instead of three.

Grades. Good student discounts are not automatic and nobody at the carrier is going to call and ask. Across eight years that is real money, and it has to be requested and re-verified.

Every ticket. Under the same July 2025 changes, serious violations now sit in the rating period for five years rather than three. Stacked on an eight-year surcharge, one bad night at nineteen follows a kid a long way.

If you have a driver in that window, it is worth one honest look at the policy instead of just paying the number on the bill for the next eight years.

Send me the dec page with names blacked out and I will tell you what is actually driving the premium.

09/24/2026

The driver who hits you carries the state minimum. Your medical bills come to $180,000. Where does the rest come from?

North Carolina gave that question a much better answer on July 1, 2025, and I would guess nine out of ten drivers have never heard about it.

Underinsured motorist coverage is the part of your own policy that pays when the at-fault driver does not carry enough. Three things changed.

One. It is now included on new and renewed policies rather than something you had to qualify for and could turn down.

Two. It is no longer reduced by a setoff. The old math was rough: your UIM limit, minus whatever the at-fault driver already paid. Carry $50,000 in UIM, the other driver pays their $50,000, and you were left with nothing. The statute now says underinsured motorist coverage shall not be reduced by a setoff or credit against any coverage, with a narrow exception for workers compensation.

Three. If you are insured under UIM on more than one policy, the statute now adds them together rather than making you pick one.

Put the second one against a real number. You are hurt badly by a driver carrying the new state minimum of $50,000, and you carry $50,000 of UIM yourself.

Old rules: their $50,000, minus a $50,000 setoff. You collect their fifty and nothing more.

Current rules: their $50,000, plus your $50,000. One hundred thousand.

Same crash, same policy, twice the money. That is the difference between a claim that covers the surgery and one that does not.

So go find the line on your declarations page that says UNDERINSURED, or UM and UIM. Look at the number beside it. That number is the ceiling on what you can collect when somebody with a minimum policy changes your life.

Most people carry the smallest amount the policy allows. It is also usually one of the cheapest lines on the page to raise, because it only pays out in a situation that is statistically uncommon and financially catastrophic. Which is precisely what insurance is for.

Tell me what your UIM line says and I will tell you what it actually means for you. No quote attached.

If you can recite your liability limits off the top of your head, they are probably wrong now.For decades North Carolina...
09/21/2026

If you can recite your liability limits off the top of your head, they are probably wrong now.

For decades North Carolina's minimum was 30/60/25. Thirty thousand for one person's injuries, sixty thousand for everyone in the other car, twenty-five thousand for their property.

Since July 1, 2025, the state minimum is 50/100/50.

That is not a small adjustment. Property damage doubled. Bodily injury went up two-thirds.

There is a catch in how it took effect, and it is the reason a lot of people still have no idea it happened. The new minimums applied to policies issued or renewed on or after July 1, 2025, not to every policy on the road that morning. If yours renewed in May of 2025, you drove on the old limits until your next renewal. By now nearly everyone has cycled through, and nearly everyone got moved up without reading the letter.

Why the state did it is straightforward. A twenty-five thousand dollar property damage limit was written for a different era of car prices. The average new vehicle in this country is running just under fifty thousand dollars. You can total a two-year-old pickup and blow through $25,000 without anyone going to the hospital.

And when you blow through it, the other driver's attorney does not stop at your policy limit. They come to you.

What I would actually do with this.

Pull your declarations page. If it says 50/100/50, you are sitting at the state minimum. That is the floor. It is the least the law will let you buy.

For most families with a house and any savings, 100/300/100 is the conversation worth having. On a lot of policies the difference is less per month than people expect, because liability is the cheapest coverage on the page. Most people never use it.

Then ask whether you should have an umbrella. If you own a home, have teenage drivers, or have anything worth taking, a million dollars of umbrella coverage is usually one of the better dollar-for-dollar buys in insurance.

None of this is urgent the way a claim is urgent. It is the kind of thing that is free to check and expensive to have been wrong about.

North Carolina policy? Tell me what the first line of your dec page says and I will tell you straight whether it is enough for your situation.

Every fall somebody tells you to watch for deer. Nobody tells you what it does to your insurance.North Carolina had 63,4...
09/17/2026

Every fall somebody tells you to watch for deer. Nobody tells you what it does to your insurance.

North Carolina had 63,487 animal-related crashes from 2022 through 2024. About 90 percent of them were deer. They caused $216 million in damage, injured 2,866 people and killed 23.

They do not spread evenly across the year. November alone accounts for 23 percent of them. Add October and December and you are over half the annual total in three months. It starts in about two weeks.

Guilford County was second in the state. Randolph was third. This is not an eastern North Carolina problem or a mountain problem. It is a Piedmont problem.

Here is the part that costs money.

If you hit the deer, that is a comprehensive claim. Same bucket as a hailstorm or a limb through the windshield. It is generally not treated as an at-fault accident.

If you swerve, miss the deer, and hit a tree, a ditch, a mailbox or another car, that is a collision claim. Different deductible, and depending on what you hit, it can go on your record as at fault.

Same deer. Same night. The difference between those two outcomes is a decision you make in about half a second.

NCDOT's advice is to brake hard and stay in your lane. Do not swerve. Their reasoning has nothing to do with insurance. It is that swerving is how a deer strike becomes a rollover or a head-on. The coverage question just happens to point the same direction.

Two things worth checking before November.

Do you carry comprehensive at all? If you dropped it on an older paid-off vehicle, a deer is coming out of your pocket. That can be a perfectly reasonable choice. It should be a choice you made on purpose.

What is your comprehensive deductible? A lot of people are carrying a thousand dollars there without knowing it.

Not sure what you have? Send me your declarations page with your name blacked out and I will tell you in two minutes.

Ask most homeowners what their deductible is and they'll give you a clean number. A thousand dollars. Twenty-five hundre...
09/08/2026

Ask most homeowners what their deductible is and they'll give you a clean number. A thousand dollars. Twenty-five hundred.

That's the all-perils deductible. It's the one that applies to a kitchen fire, a burst pipe, a tree through the roof.

There's usually a second one, and it's a lot bigger.

Wind and hail damage commonly carries its own separate deductible on North Carolina homeowners policies, and it's typically written as a percentage of your dwelling coverage rather than a flat dollar amount.

Using the state's own examples: 1% on a home insured for $200,000 is a $2,000 deductible. 2% on a home insured for $300,000 is $6,000.

Same policy. Same house. A completely different number depending on what caused the damage.

So the hailstorm that takes your roof doesn't cost you the thousand dollars you had in your head. On that $300,000 house at 2%, the first $6,000 is yours.

And here's the part that gets people: it moves. As your dwelling coverage rises with construction costs - and it has risen considerably - the percentage stays put while the dollar figure climbs right along with it. Your deductible got bigger and nobody mailed you a letter about it.

Named storm deductibles are a third thing, narrower still, and only trigger when the National Weather Service actually names the storm.

Go pull up your declarations page and look for the words WINDSTORM or HAIL near your deductible. If there's a percent sign anywhere near them, that's your real number for the single most likely claim you will ever file.

Can't find it, or can't make sense of it? Send it over with your name blacked out and I'll read it back to you in plain English.

Address

157 Yadkin Valley Road
Advance, NC
27006

Opening Hours

Monday 8:30am - 5pm
Tuesday 8:30am - 5pm
Wednesday 8:30am - 5pm
Thursday 8:30am - 5pm
Friday 8:30am - 5pm

Telephone

+13362804606

Website

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