Home Insurance in FL? (1 Viewer)

My wife and I will be moving shortly to Jacksonville, FL. Anyone have any suggestions/recommendations for home insurance? Not only companies to consider, but what kind of coverage to get?

thanx.

I'm in Jacksonville. Welcome to our city. When are you coming? As for insurance stay with the big names. I have allstate cover my home and autos and get a discount because of it. As for coverage I would reccomend everything full blown because you never know. Luckily we haven't had any problems like they have in South Florida but...The biggest factor would be looking at the flood zones for wherever your buying a house at.

As currently scheduled, we will move in early to mid December. Strictly speaking, we are not in Jacksonville, but Orange Park.

Our house is new construction and is not in a flood zone. This is a job xfer for my wife and we've known about it for 2-3 months. You can bet we paid more attention than usual to the hurricanes and were happy the Jacksonville was spared the worst of it. Don't take that to mean I wished anyone else ill will though.

Right now in Little Rock we are with AAA. Will certainly consider Allstate.

O.P. is nice. It's another county from Jacksonville and the schools are better if you have children. I actually live in St. Augustine now and work in Jacksonville. My wife and I built there last year when we got married. It's off county road 210 if your familiar with the area at all.We both work for J&J for their contact lens division. We work in R&D. If you don't mind me asking what company is she transferring with? There are a lot of job opportunities here. Have you been here much? O.P. is a growning area and gets very congested during high traffic times.You'll be here just in time for Superbowl...

She is with Fidelity Financial Information Services. I'll have to dig out a map to find where you are.

BTW, are there any decent organic food stores in the area, say, like Wild Oats?

Our househunting trip was our first visit to the area. We made our decision to move based on the fact she has a very good job and doesn't want to change careers.

For myself, I'm retired.

We have two stores here called Native Sun. One of them is near O.P..I'm not into that so I couldn't really give you an opinion. I knw there are Wild Oats in Miami where our other house is. I think you will find Jacksonville is a very family oriented city. Although it's growing there is still a small town feel at times. There is always something to do. The winters don't get severly cold but it does get below freezing a couple of times a year. This area people jokingly call South Georgia. O.P. has a very diverse group of people. Not too far from you is Middleburg which is the redneck capitol.. This place is very into college football ( Gators,Noles,Dawgs and Caines) The Jaguars, Nascar, Golf (The T.P.C. is here and the Hall of Fame). I could go on and on. I really love living here. Heres a couple of our local news sites to get a feel. They each have forums too.
www.Jacksonville.com
www.firstcoastnews.com
If you have any questions feel free to e-mail me.

John, I got the college football angle after talking with our realtor for a short time. We live in Little Rock and the college game is big here too.

We're originally from San Diego and we seem to be moving futher into the South. I'm sure this will be a new experience for us, and a happy one.

Speaking of freezing, what part of the year do you have to water and mow the grass? Does it ever go dormant? It does in LR.

Thanks for clueing me into Native Sun. We checked out the brand new Publix near us, nice store. I asked a customer service person about senior day (as in discount, I'm 58) and she said "what?" Guess they don't do that. Maybe there's too many seniors to give discounts too.

You know, my passion is sking, and from the looks of the land (flat) and the temp, I'm guessing there's not much of it in FL

There's plenty of skiing....just on water... If you love golf there is no doubt this is the town. There are so many public and semi private courses here. Are you by chance building in Oak Leaf Plantation?

The skiing I love is on snow and I haven't golfed in years. I'd consider starting up again, but I don't want to take away money budgeted for skiing.

Yes, our home is in Oak Leaf Plantation, the Waverly portion.

BTW, is part of HTF's problem, not sending out email notifications on thread replies? I'm not getting any on anything I post on.

Hmmm...never knew there was such a thing...:b I'm new to this. There are a couple of places here that ararnge ski trips in the winter. If I remember correctly one of the big surf shops here still has an indoor ski area and they plan trips. My brother goes out to Alta or Breckenridge every winter. Boone N.C. is not too far but not like the snow out west or in New England.
I hope Oak Leaf turns out the way they have planned. There was a lot of controversy over it being built. Mainly the size and amount of homes versues the traffic and school situation. Schools here are very overcrowded.....But your retired....enjoy that...
Nice thing about your area is close to the mall,sams club, best buy, circuit city and sound advice...

I wasn't aware of school overcrowding. Doesn't the tax base that Oakleaf brings in support more schools? We won't be contributing to that since we have no kids.

It doesn't surprise me that Oakleaf was controversial, something that big was bound to be. I read a section in the Sunday paper while there, indicating the hurricanes wouldn't slow Florida growth in general and Jacksonville might benefit more since it is seldom directly hit by hurricanes.

When you start a topic or reply to a topic, there's a checkbox for email notification, which has always worked in the past.

http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/l...?storyid=26509


This is what I was talking about. The biggest problem is they don't build before the need. When we got the lottery it was supposed to subsidize the school budget but ended up being the budget. Now we have abill trying to pass to legalize slots at paremutial tracks. Luckily that doesn't affect you... I think you'll like it here though.

You mean the government doesn't plan ahead? What a shock.

BTW, have you heard anything about AAA as far as home and car insurance goes, in FL?

> I wasn't aware of school overcrowding. Doesn't the tax base that Oakleaf brings in support more schools?

This is a common trick here in FL (and probably elsewhere). They build a new school, and when it opens, it's not big enough to hold all the students. So they have to put some of them in portable classrooms. That gets people upset, and you'd think they were holding classes in a dumpster or something. Then we get all the stories on the news about "overcrowded schools", which is just a ploy for more funding. The reality is that the portables are air-conditioned. The biggest drawback I know if is that they aren't connected to the main building.

Anyway, if we're building a school now that will open in fall 2005, shouldn't we have a good idea of how many students it will need to hold? Maybe look at how many are in the lower grades now and add some capacity to allow for future growth? Maybe look at our records of student count over the past 30 years and come up with a fairly close estimate of that? But they don't do it. If there will be 1000 students, they'll build it for 800. It seems to me that if you're already building a school, it doesn't cost too much more to add a few classrooms. Just like adding a bedroom to the design of a house should be cheaper than adding it on later.

The other thing that kills me is when they say that due to population growth, we need to raise property taxes for schools, roads, etc. Huh? Aren't those new people paying taxes? So the amount of taxes collected goes up with each new family. Unless they are all homeless- they all either own or rent a home, meaning property taxes are paid, not to mention sales taxes and everything else.

If 10,000 families left the state, would anyone say we should cut taxes due to lower expenses? No, they'd probably say revenue is down, so we need to raise taxes.

This is like Burger King saying that since they have more customers now, they need to raise the price of Whoppers to cover the expenses.


> I read a section in the Sunday paper while there, indicating the hurricanes wouldn't slow Florida growth in general

That's interesting, because a few weeks ago there were reports of people saying they'd had enough and were going to move out of state, and that others would be afraid to move here. Of course that was during the weeks of hurricanes.

I don't think we'll know til a year from now- if we get more big storms hitting like this year, some people probably will leave. But if it's the more typical, calmer storm season of the past 10 years or so, people will think of 2004 as a fluke.

Johnny,
Here's a article that I think you might be interested in about a couple of organic resturants. I haven't heard anything good or bad about AAA insurance.
http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-onlin...17018582.shtml

You may not have a choice in what homeowners policy you get, particularly if it is new construction. I would suggest you start with the insurere you presently have on your home.

Unfortunatly in FL the free market program for insurance does not work well and many carriers will often refuse to insure you for no reason.

You may also watn to try asking your contractor to let you buy the construction insurance policy as often this can 'bookmark' you for homeowners when the house is done.

Regardless of flood zone, have flood insurance. Not being in a Flood Zone just means it will be cheap.

I get my insurance through AAA here in FL. I live in NW Florida, in Pensacola, you know where Ivan just hit. I got an adjuster and a check before my parents who have Allstate and their house was completly destroyed and they still have not heard from the flood guy from Allstate. My neighboor has State Farm and they are having so much trouble. Through AAA I have Met Life and they have been nothing but good to me on my Home Owners and Car Insurance. It will save you some money if you have both policies with the same company.

My advise is stick with a fairly large company but not too large. Allstate, State Farm, and others are so large (customer wise), that when a disaster like a hurricane hits, they have so many claims it is hard to get to everyone within a reasonable time frame. Especially when 4 of these retarded things hits the same state so close to each other.

Insurance in the NE florida area isn't like the rest of Florida. We have been lucky. My house in MIami is a pain in the ass every year when it's time to renew.
I think Allstate and the like are so backed up because they have so many customers that they need to get to unlike a company like Met Life.

I don't understand this at all. Do you mean by bookmark, it makes it easier to get homeowner's insurance after construction?

BTW, here in Arkansas, we have AAA on our homeowners and auto insurance.

Jon, is AAA really writing your insurance or are they brokering it out? I called AAA and they forwarded me to this guy in Jacksonville, who is an independent agent. He's telling my my auto insurance might not even be AAA and the home definetely won't be.

If you really have AAA can you tell me your agent name and number?