seanharper

The national flood insurance program shows one of the downsides with government participating in the private market (there are some plusses as well) - their rates were set too low, and that created a group of people who were politically motivated to agitate to keep them low. It's very hard to find the political will to raise insurance prices on those people, even though the majority of people/voters understand that it's a subsidy that doesn't make sense - first because its not fair, second because it encourages outsizes risk taking.

People will always be willing to pay a premium to live near the ocean. There are some places where that premium will be too high except the very very wealthy - living on a barrier island - for example.

In order to enjoy living in places where nature exact a larger toll - near the ocean, on a mountain that gets dry and doesn't have a fire station nearby - homeowners will need to invest in hardening their homes, invest in buying more expensive insurance and will need to make sure they have the financial buffer to rebuild if their home is damaged by the weather.

As the ocean rises, we will need to move more inland.

+1 for metal roofs -- I run an insurance company that specializes in high risk areas. Metal roofs are a superior technology to shingles and tiles.

In Florida Citizens is the largest homeowners insurance company and it competes vigorously with the private market.

The issue with Citizens is that it does create a lot of financial risk for the state, especially since it doesn't buy as much reinsurance as a private company would.

I don't think that's a fair characterization of how pricing works in homeowners insurance. Every time you want to change prices, you need to justify the price change to the regulator using the actuarial math. The regulator's own actuaries review the actuarial math and, if they don't agree, will not change allow the rate change.

One of the hardest things about insurance is figuring out the probabilities of very unlikely events. Hurricane Andrew was a moderately large storm that directly hit three major population centers - Miami, Ft. Myers and New Orleans. That circumstance is infrequent enough that modeling it statistically leaves a wide range of uncertainty.

I would think about insurance as more of a smoothing mechanism of inherently uncertain outcomes. When something happens that's unexpected and causes a larger loss, that is typically recouped by the industry over a few years of higher rates. That way the industry is still absorbing volatility, which is valuable to their customers, but doesn't require that they be 100% correct about the probabilities of infrequent events.

I am the CEO of a tech company that provides homeowners insurance in hard to insure places.

I don't think it's really a bad thing for a company like Farmers to cut costs. Insurance companies are by and large pretty bloated from a cost perspective and could do to be more efficient, reduce overhead, use more technology.

It's very common for homeowners insurance companies to have expense ratios of 30-40%. So if you are paying $3000 per year thats ~$1000 EVERY YEAR that is being wasted on branches/agencies you don't visit and corporate overhead.

+1 -- Chicago is top 5 in startup/vc activity, has a number of big/successful tech companies -- groupon, orbitz, 37s, Braintree, etc. Google has nearly 3000 people there (including the 2500 or so from Motorola mobility). There is an active tech community lots of events meet ups, two top 10 national universities and 4 other large universities.

There are some expensive neighborhoods but also many cheap ones that are super fun if you are young and don't have kids or care about school quality.

Public transport here is ok - very extensive systems but some lines are pretty slow. Culturally we have everything you would expect of a very large city - great restaurants, museums, music, etc.

There is actually the capability to do an instant transfer over visa and mastercard networks as well, but it is somewhat expensive (>0.20) -- the pin debit networks are smaller and more willing to negotiate this sort of thing, and since most debit cards are able to process on more than one pin debit network you can get 100% coverage with just a couple of the pin debit networks playing ball.

That they are not allowing this for credit cards indicates that they are using the pin debit networks.

They are not using ACH for this, but rather probably using the PIN-debit networks such as star, interlink, nyce and accel.

Recently more so, for example they recently legalized concealed weapons, and the current VP candidate Ryan and also their current governor are both pretty extreme.

Historically Wisconsin has been a pretty progressive state, similar to its neighbors Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota.

Milwaukee, like most big midwest cities, is highly segregated with some pretty frightening ghettos and areas of poverty, although not as bad as cities whose economies have done worse like Detroit, Cleveland, etc.

Hey Conductr - we have been able to replicate the issue, it appears to only impact 1 merchant account provider. I suspect it has to do with something changing in their API.

Our focus has certainly been more on Samurai, especially since the acquisition, but the original site feefighters.com worked fine for many people last week.