State Farm – No Longer Awesome

We have had State Farm for what seems like forever, my wife has had them since the '70’s and soon after we got married we consolidated everything into a State Farm package so everything was covered. Since we had no claims everything was great! We bought the RV and had 2 claims, both were handled in my view perfectly by State Farm.

Enter the house, last June we had a bad wind and hail storm, the roof was damaged as was the siding. The claim process was a nightmare, denied the first time even though the examiner saw damage, so we said fine, if State Farm says there isn’t enough damage then what can we do? I am not the kind of person who files a claim without having very good reason and they say everything is fine. They had done right by us for the RV, why would they be any different for the house?

I have found that how one division acts has nothing to do with another division, they’re like separate companies completely. I was ignorant of this fact.

We had our door knocked on by every single storm damage construction company out there saying they would handle everything and we turned each and every one of them down. Enter March 2011, an even worse hail and wind storm and now there is more damage, you can actually see the roof tiles were cracked from the impact and we have dings all over the siding.

State Farm came out and said yes you clearly have enough damage to warrant roof and siding replacement. They sent us a check for several thousand dollars less than the damage and said we would need to revisit the claim if the repairs were more than the check. We decided to wait until Spring of 2012…. our mistake… last night we get a form letter from some underwriter at State Farm stating “This insurance coverage is no longer acceptable to State Farm Fire and Casualty Company because of your overall claim activity”. Number of claims on file? ONE! 

He then states the overall claim activity was the hail damage which hasn’t even been cashed or repaired yet. I do some research and find out that for State Farm this has become typical practice and there are class action lawsuits against them for it, who woulda thunk it?

I wrote my State Farm agent and told him there is no longer any reason to have State Farm unless this could be rectified since we would lose the discount from having everything insured with them, at least $220.00 a year discount, gone. Lets say he gets State Farm to keep our house insured with them, no way in hell I’m staying with them for longer than it takes to switch. How is one claim in all the years we have done business with them too many claims? The check is for $12,000, the damage is over $18,500 so now we can’t even get everything fixed without going back to get the difference.

I’m calling USAA since they give Veterans a discount plus they also insure everything and if they pass muster we’re going to drop State Farm like they clearly want to be dropped and hopefully USAA works out. I started doing some research about this and have found there are websites dedicated to exposing State Farm for their tactics in the home insurance field.

We’ll see how this new drama unfolds after our Agent contacts the underwriter to see what can be done.