Post Race!

Wow, that's quite a curve-ball.

The Smurfstang visits cow country

Attachment 136721

According to Larry Wall, the original author of the Perl programming language, there are three great virtues of a programmer; Laziness, Impatience and Hubris

Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.
Impatience: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.
Hubris: The quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.
source : http://threevirtues.com/

I'm feeling depressed y'all.

I don't know if I can keep my business open for many more months.

Doing that insurance thing is not paying off for you? Can you add additional services in any way?

Unfortunately not. I'm a captive agent and cannot do any outside activity that is not approved by Allstate.

So....you're not really in good hands?

What's the basic issue? Insufficient population? Too much competition?

It is our strict guidelines combined with our rates in our area. We have an extremely competitive home insurance considering that we're the only admitted carrier in my parish that writes home insurance in the whole parish, but what Allstate did after Hurricanes Rita and Katrina left a bad taste in peoples mouth here. With our auto rates, if you do not fit into Allstate's specific niche, then we're going to be substantially higher.

My biggest issue is not the money; my family can live off of $20,000 a year. What I'm getting concerned with is that I have a 6 month validation item count, I'm a little bit half way to it, but I only have less than 60 days to meet it. If I do not meet the validation then I cannot keep my contract.

I'm kind of venting to y'all because I cannot really tell anyone else this. To everyone else, the business is doing great and I have a great career opportunity.

Heck, I don't even understand it. I don't know what a 6 month validation count even means.

So, you feel that people are going elsewhere because Allstate burned some bridges? I can understand that. Anywhere that has to deal with hurricanes has to deal with some screwy insurance situations. It's not easy for the company to figure out what to charge, either. I suspect that most companies underestimate their true liability exposure for an area by underestimating the likelihood of a direct hit. Those direct hits are frequent if you sum across the entire coastal area, but not frequent at any one specific point, so I would think that the temptation to understate the probability in order to make policies look more affordable is pretty strong. I guess it also depends on the return on investment that the insurance company sees if they don't pay out on a policy, so if investments underperform they can be left hanging.

Maybe there's no assurance with insurance.

My 6 month validation count means that I need to have so many policies in force(72) before my 6th month with the company.

Allstate and State Farm got nearly destroyed in 2005 because of Hurricane Rita and Hurricane Katrina. The two companies had a combined homeowners market share of those who were affected was about 84%, which was way too large. In fact, both companies lost as much money in claims then they made in their company's history. So what did they do? They stopped writing homes all together in parishes that touched the Gulf of Mexico and those directly north of the parishes that touched the Gulf of Mexico.

I don't think there's much I can say except to wish you all the best. It would suck if the opportunity disappeared.

You could do the half full take on this...

2 months to spin up...

Next 2 months got you 50% of your 72...

You have 2 months left!

Have you graphed or plotted your activity over the past 4 months? Can you see that it's increasing (holidays over - spring almost here...)

Yep, right now I'm purchasing 15 internet leads a day and I'm getting anywhere between 1-2 referrals a day. Hopefully this will be enough to reach my goal.

Yesterday my only employee quit(no show/no call) so I'm going to have to higher a new one today, just one more setback.

Employees really stink - I'm going to guess that 1 out of 3 of the people I've had work for me have been even reasonable - and maybe on 1 out of 10 would be someone I would take on for a permanent position.

Back before I became self-employed I always fully signed on to whatever workplace I was in. I wish that was the norm.

I had no idea how bad finding employees would be. I have a lot of friends who complain that they cannot find a job, but when I tell them that I'm hiring they always find an excuse for one reason or another.

I can almost find myself becoming some "old man Jenkins" complaining about the work ethnics of kids these days!!

My step daughter who's 22 is a manager at a store at the mall and works another job to pay off student loans - so I know she's not part of this crowd! But they are out there...

Heck I'm 24 and I come into work at 7:30AM and do not leave until 7:00PM.

My younger brother(22), before entering into the military was the same way too.

My youngest brother(17), has never worked a job a day in his life and when he does chores or errands he complains the entire time.

Well, he's a teenager. I don't think I really valued things correctly at that time.

I never owned a home when I was in the hurricane zone, but I have friends that do. The cost of living is insane because of the cost of insurance, but the cost of insurance probably isn't as high as it ought to be. I was living in the FL Keys. On average, they were hit once every 7 years, and since they are fairly small and low-lying, a hit is pretty nearly always going to be a very complete hit. However, as the dice would have it, when I was there in the 90s, they hadn't been hit in over 30 years. In the 60s, kids played ball in the highway because cars were so rare. Now, the place is thoroughly developed. The storm surge from a category 3 storm would submerge all but the highest points of the Keys. Oddly, that means that all the homes would be destroyed, but a few convenience stores might escape destruction.

If you have a $300,000 house that gets destroyed every 7 years, on average, what would the insurance rate have to be per year? There are lots of factors going into that, but any company that has to shell out to replace all thouse houses in the Florida Keys every few years is going to go broke unless they charge a fortune, or can spread the costs across a wide area.

I'm not surprised that companies have pulled out of the Gulf Coast region, I'm just surprised that any remain.