08/13/2026
Hey everyone, I was in the middle of giving a presentation last night when my phone started erupting with texts, calls, and messages from people about their insurance. There was a post made that named me and Farm Bureau, and said that our area is seeing an increase. My post is to give some clarification to the post and try to explain some things. Due to the private nature of how I treat each policy, I will not make any direct comments to that post or to anyone else’s policy that would give away any sort of private information. This may be one of my longer posts, and I apologize for that, but I would love it if everyone took a minute to read it. I am also probably not going to post this to the classifieds, as this is not an item for sale and so if you would be willing to share this post for more people to see, I would really appreciate that. I will also mention that these are my opinions of what happened and not a direct statement for Farm Bureau and why or how they changed their rates. This is my opinion when looking at some of the changes and as to why those changes were made.
Though there are areas of the state that insurance is seeing a larger increase, I don’t feel that that is “our area”. There are so many factors that can come into play when talking about insurance and how premiums are decided. How a premium is figured for each person is so intricate that I couldn’t even begin to make claims to describe exactly how each person is rated, but I will give some examples of what is figured into the rate. The rates can be decided by: age, s*x, marital status, location in that state that you live (mainly your location in terms of your protection class that is, at times, decided by how far you are from a fire station and their response times and things of that nature), the age of your house, the age of your cars, your insurance score, your driving history, your fireline rating, your experience modification factor & premium stability factor, your claims history, and the list goes on.
All of these items can decide what you get charged, and pinpointing the exact reason for rates increasing or decreasing, can be a little bit difficult. With all of that being said, we did see some adjustments to our rating at Farm Bureau, and that is not a secret. Before getting into those details I will say that every year we have people that increase and decrease by either a little bit or a lot and before everyone calls in to ask what their policy is going to do, we will have to wait until we are closer to your renewal. Those rates won’t adjust until your next renewal and we won’t be able to see the exact rates until about a month or so out from the renewal.
Within insurance, I get a lot of complaints from people saying that it’s not fair that their premiums are going to pay for someone’s new vehicle to be fixed when they choose to drive an older vehicle. I have similar comments about people’s houses, farm equipment and inland marine items. With the adjustment that Farm Bureau has recently made, they would have pulled histories of losses over a long period of time and used a term called “the law of large numbers” to be able to adjust the premium being charged. Newer vehicles are absolutely going to cost more money than an older vehicle to repair. With the sensors, calibrations and cost of parts, a newer vehicle will cost substantially more than the same exact damage to a vehicle that is 15-20 years old. Due to that, it appears that Farm Bureau is spreading the gap so that the owners of the newer vehicles pay a more accurate cost and the owners of the older vehicles a more accurate cost.
With a house, most policies are written on a “replacement cost” and not an “actual cash value” basis like vehicles. If a total loss happens to a house, it would need to be “replaced” and so even though it may be an older home, it would cost the same to replace that older home as we cannot give you an older house but still have it rebuilt today. To fix a house, it would cost about the same to fix a certain damage from an older house to a newer house so rates can’t be figured the same way as cars saying that a repair would cost more for the newer item. The better way to rate houses would be on the amount of claims that are likely to be made and the best way to do that is the age of the home. Older homes are proven to have a higher chance of having a loss, so the way that those would be figured would be based mainly on age. Just like it’s not fair for an owner of an older vehicle to pay larger portions for someone that wants a newer car, it is not fair for newer home owners to share that larger of a cost that goes into owning an older home. Though all insurance is cost sharing and premiums do go to help the ones with the losses, it appears that all the adjustments being made are to make premiums more “fair”.
I hope that everyone can see that there are multiple sides to each story and explanations to both sides. Not everyone understands the intricacy of how rates are figured and that’s OK. I had no idea how much goes into insurance until I became an agent and started trying to explain everything to make sense. Last year my own policy took a large increase (before these rate adjustments that are currently being talked about). When I looked into what happened it was partially because of me and my wife’s age, our insurance score and also our experience modification factor. Though each of those would take a great deal to talk about here, make sure and ask me about it in person because I would love to bore you with those terms and what they mean.
I realize that this is not ideal for some people, and I am very sorry for that. Each year we have close to half of our clients increasing in premium and close to half decreasing in premium. We are in a similar situation now and some people are seeing increases and some are seeing decreases due to this rate adjustment. The miscommunication that may have led anyone to believe that it is "our area" would be that a lot of homes in our area are older homes. I will let you know that every year these changes cause a great stress because I want to see everyone happy, but that is not always possible. I will also say that I work very hard to find the best rate and try very hard but sometimes certain things are just out of my control. If you have had an increase or are concerned about your policy, I encourage everyone to come to me so we can discuss everything involved, and I will try to do everything in my power to help.
I will end by saying that I will be trying to reach out to those who are having increases. This time of year has been very busy, so sometimes it may even be after the renewal, but I am trying very hard. If you have questions or concerns, please reach out and I will help any way that I can. If you feel that your policy has gone up and want to shop around, that is fine. We have had a few people shop around just to come back and say that rates were close with all the quotes that they got. We have lost a few clients because every company is going to rate people and their items differently. We may rate one way, one year, that is not favorable to someone and another company may have different reports that are causing them to rate you differently. Ultimately, I will not stop fighting for my customers but if the cost of another company is better enough to move over, I will not hold that against anyone. I want to see people happy with their coverage and happy with the claims process when they have a claim.
I sure appreciate all of our customers and feel that the next few days will be a bit busier because of these posts and I will try to work through all of the calls and texts in a timely manner. Thanks to all of my customers, I appreciate you more than you know!
