Ohio Workers' Compensation for Your Home or Business

If you are in the State of Ohio and employ at least one employee to whom you pay $160 or more in a three month period, you are required to carry Ohio Workers’ Compensation. Your employee could be with your business or simply a babysitter or person you hire to mow your grass.
In Ohio you buy Workers’ Compensation from the State’s Bureau of Workers’ Compensation. Their website address is www.ohiobwc.com or you can call them at 1-800-OHIO-BWC.

Unfortunately your Homeowner Policy Personal Liability cannot help you in situations where you are paying the employee more than $160 in a quarter, so we highly recommend that you purchase an Ohio Workers’ Compensation policy if you are in this situation.
Workers’ Compensation pays for injuries to your workers and includes not only medical expenses but loss of income benefits, too.

The website at www.ohiobwc.com is actually very helpful. If you decided you need to buy a policy, you can do it all on-line including paying for the coverage and printing out a temporary policy to show you have the protection.

Please feel free to contact one of our friendly agents if you wish to learn more about workers’ compensation.

Catastrophe Liability Protection

How much liability protection do I need to carry to protect me and my family? Unfortunately there is no simple formula which you can use to calculate how much liability insurance you really need. With your home or a commercial property, there are computer programs which will help determine the construction replacement cost of the building, but there is no such program in the area of third party liability claims. Some insurance companies claim they make you “legal” for less, but in Ohio, for example, that means bodily injury limits of $12,500 per person/$25,000 per accident and property damage limits of $7,500. Any kind of serious accident will wipe out those limits in a heartbeat. As a bare minimum, we recommend no less than $500,000 in Personal Liability and $250,000/500,000/100,000 in Automobile Liability, but higher limits are available and recommended. This is where the Umbrella Liability Policy comes into play. These policies are written in increments of $1,000,000 with $1,000,000 being the lowest limit you can purchase. Limits of $1,000,000 to $5,000,000 are usually available, and higher limits are also available depending on the circumstances. Please contact us, and we will prepare a quotation for your review on this very important catastrophe liability protection.

As a proud representative of Progressive we want to make sure our Progressive personal auto clients are up to date with the discounts that are available to them. Below are a few ways to capitalize on the discounts that Progressive is offering:

1. Paid in Full: This discount is given if you pay the full six month premium upon renewal. The discount is based on your premium so it differs per client.



2. Electronic Funds Transfer: This is where Progressive withdraws your monthly premium directly out of your checking account. This method of paying is cheaper in fees than paying by check each month.



3. Paperless Option: Progressive offers clients the option of receiving their policy and bills via email instead of through the US Postal Service. A discount will be applied to the client's personal auto policy if they choose this method.

Travelers TV Ad

This is our agencies favorite Travelers TV Ad. It makes us proud to have them as part of our agency. Enjoy!

Cost Savings Ideas

There is constant talk today about cutting costs. Here are two options that might help you save a few dollars on your insurance in this rough economy.

1)Raise your deductibles:

A typical homeowner policy has a deductible of $500 and a typical auto insurance policy has $100 for comprehensive and $250 for collision deductibles. One way to help save a few dollars on your annual insurance bill is to increase your homeowner deductible to $1000 and your comprehensive and collision deductibles on your auto to $500 each. Note that when you do this you bring a little bit of the financial risk back on yourself. A good rule of thumb to help figure out if the deductible change is worth the risk is to take the savings you will get for increasing your deductible and multiply it by three. If that number is larger than the difference between your old deductible and your new deductible in my opinion you are taking on an appropriate amount of risk for the savings.

2) Drop physical damage on your old vehicles.

If a car is 10 years or older it is probably worth researching whether you should have comprehensive and collision coverage on your car (many people know this as "full coverage"). Two ways to help you decide if dropping comprehensive and or collision from your car is worth it are:
1. The Insurance Information Institute says that if your car is worth less than 10 times the amount you pay annually for comprehensive and collision coverage it isn't worth keeping the coverage.
2. Another way to analyze if it is worth keeping the coverage is to take the premium you pay for collision and add it to your deductible amount. That is the total amount that it costs you to insure your car. (i.e. Your annual collision premium is $250 and your collision deductible is $500. If you total your car you will have paid $750 ($250 in premium and $500 in deductible) before you received any money from your insurance company) If in your mind it isn't worth spending that kind of money to save your vehicle if it was totaled than you might want to consider dropping that coverage.

My Tree, Their Vehicle... Whose Insurance?

About a year ago I received a call from my neighbor. He sounded as if something was wrong; “Where are you” he asked? I informed him that I was away from home at the moment but was there something I could help him with. “Yeah, you can come get your huge tree limb off my SUV!” I immediately turned around and headed home. Once I got there I saw what is pictured here in this blog post. Because of heavy winds my huge front yard tree had dropped a limb and totally smashed the top of my neighbor’s vehicle. He and I spent the whole next day cutting away at the tree limb so that we could eventually tow his car to a body shop.

Now my neighbor lives next door to an insurance man so he was already well versed in whose insurance takes care of the damages to his SUV but for those of you that are not as privileged to live next to an insurance man I thought I would explain. Even though it was my tree that caused the damage my homeowner policy would not be involved in paying for the damages. In order for me to be responsible I would have to be negligent in some way but since it was an “act of God” (wind) negligence could not be pointed at me. Therefore, the coverage for the damage to his vehicle would fall under his personal auto policy. More specifically it would be his comprehensive or “other than collision” coverage. Since this coverage usually has a deductible (the amount the policy holder has to pay out of pocket before the insurance company takes care of the rest) I offered to help pay the amount he would have to pay out of pocket. I was not required to do this but since I like my neighbor and it was my tree, I felt it was the right thing to do.

There is, however, one situation that could have made the tree limb fall my fault. If for some reason my neighbor felt that my tree was unhealthy and dangerous he could compose a letter and “send receipt” a letter to me (meaning upon delivery I would have to sign a document stating I had received the letter). In the letter he would have to state that he felt my tree was in danger of falling and causing damage to his property. If that had been the case and my neighbor had sent me the letter he could have had grounds that I was negligent. This in turn would cause my homeowner policy to pay out for his damages and not his personal auto policy.

By the way, my tree is very healthy so there is no need for my neighbor to write a letter.

Fey Insurance Announces New Blog

The ways of communication are constantly changing. Mail has been largely replaced by email and in some cases email has been pushed aside by tweets or Facebook postings. Since we here at Fey Insurance Services are dedicated to communicating with our customers in the fashion they most prefer we have decided to step into the blogging world. We hope to use this blog as a way to broadcast insurance information and advice to our customers and to the public as a whole. In our firm's mission statement we state that "Fey Insurance Services is an independent insurance agency dedicated to consulting, protecting and servicing our clients...". This blog will assist us in the "consulting" side of our mission statement.

Our posts will consist of: insurance news that individuals and businesses would find useful, news about the insurance companies that we represent, insurance coverage advice, insurance trends and hopefully a few fun facts or thoughts.

We hope you all find this blog of use and please come back and visit often.