Complaint Review: Farmers Insurance

For more than 20 years, my husband and I have been doing business with Farmers Insurance. We have had a couple of relatively small claims in the past that were handled fairly well. However almost immediately after paying one, the company took the coverage for that kind of incident out of all their homeowner's policies so they would never have to pay one again!

Then a couple of years ago, my husband had a good deal of hood damage to his car from driving behind a gravel truck that was throwing large pieces of gravel even though he was a reasonable distance from the truck. They wanted to know if there were any other pings in the car from previous incidents. He told them that of course there were because a few pings in the finish happen to every car over the years. First he was told that they would cover the damage but there would be a separate deductible charge for each ping that didn't appear to have been made at the same time. We found this to be totally outrageous because trying to evaluate which chip had been made when was an impossible job, not to mention being a ridiculous requirement that was made only to put money in their pockets and force us to abort the claim. Then came the really ludicrous part - they decided not to cover any of the damage because, as they said, there was no proof that my husband hadn't purposely driven the car on a gravel road and caused the damage himself. Outside the fact that he went out of his way to keep his beloved red convertible off of gravel roads, he pointed out to them that when you are forced to drive on one, your car throws the grave behind you not in front! Simple logic which seemed to totally escape them and they denied the claim. But we decided to chalk it up to an incompetent claims adjuster and stay with the company, as we had been friends with the wife of our agent for many years.
Over two months ago we had a ceiling fan (which had been hanging for more than 18 years) fall from our ceiling and crash through a one-of-a-kind glass coffee table. We called the adjuster and the first words she gave me were of course you know if you file a claim, we'll have to raise your rates. I really thought it was rather bad form to threaten me immediately out of the gate. When I explained to her what had happened she first told me that they would cover both the fan and the coffee table. The next day she called and said they would cover the table but not the fan. So I went to the artist who had made the table and sent her the estimate for $1225 to replace the table and approximately $250 for the fan. But I still figured that even after we paid the deductible we could at least replace our art piece with a typical coffee table. The third day she called and said that they were not going to replace the table either because it was only covered if the object on the interior of the building was caused to fall by a force on the exterior of the building! Since we hadn't had an earthquake or tornado, the claim was canceled.
As luck would have it, the next incident was 4 days after the table. I had been sorting through almost 70 large boxes of collectibles that had been given to me by my mother when she went into a nursing home. They had been in a storage facility because I don't have that kind of space in my house. So we rented a building so we could spread them all out and decide what to do with them. Within two days we had all of the items out of the boxes and spread on the floor for sorting. Two days after that, I got a call from the property owner saying that the building was flooded and everything was under water. And indeed it was. Although we were able to recover the porcelain figurines, by far the majority of the collection was limited edition dolls and teddy bears. This was when the big problem started. The adjuster admitted that she had no working knowledge for a loss of this kind. There were about 135 lost items, so since I was the only one who had any knowledge of the designers, etc., I offered to come up with as much info as I could. She told me I would have to know the name of each doll, who made it and when it was purchased. An impossible task and I couldn't even get help from my mom because she suffers from substantial dementia. I spent more than 40 hours and came up with legitimate documentation on about half of the collection. She had about 15 bears from the same company so I sent a letter to Germany and they wrote me back with a replacement value of $250 each. There was a set of porcelain dolls made by another designer and although I could only find two of them, they were each valued at hundreds of dollars so the third one should be the same. I wrote to authorized retailers of other pieces and was sent the current replacement value on each piece. Since so many of them were out of production, I had to write to the designers or go to historical sites to get the information. By the time I had worked through about 60 of them I had replacement values adding up to almost $15,000. I gave the documentation to the adjuster. She told me that they had sent the list of lost items to a licensed expert doll appraiser in the Denver area and he would work out the replacement values by using a series of books. It was several weeks until I heard anything back from Farmers. Then I got a call saying that they had come up with a replacement value for the entire list that was about $5000 less than the amount of the legitimate documentation that I had for half the list! I was dumbfounded! I knew that their assessment was totally unfair and designed to save them as much money as possible while once again cheating a family who had been paying premiums for more than 20 years. To add insult to injury they said they would also have to take depreciation off the value that they had established, in spite of the fact that the damaged items were all in new condition, in their original boxes and with all artist documentation. I knew that most of them had substantially increased in value, not decreased. But that is what they were going to do and once again, logic eluded them, the only importance to the company was the bottom dollar. I told her that I felt that the value assigned by the manufacturers, designers and other sources that I had given her all came from legitimate replacement sources. I have seen appraisal books and there can be large variations in value of the same piece depending on who had written the book. I figure the company that makes or designs or markets the item knows exactly what the current value is. When we got into the matter of depreciation she said that I could recover the difference in the depreciated value and the actual value when I replaced the item. Of course the fact remains that many of the items cannot be replaced so I was told that I could replace them with an item of similar appearance and function. I told her that would be fine if we were talking about a toaster. I could, indeed, go out and find one that looked almost the same and did make toast. It would deserve to be depreciated because we had used it before and the crumbs in the bottom could reasonably be expected to lower the value. But the lost pieces were chosen by my mom for their specific appearance and appeal. If they were no longer available something similar just wasn't going to be the same. They didn't care. Because of them dragging their feet on evaluating the claim, we had to continue to rent the building for another six weeks as I still had no place to put them, thus adding on to the rapidly increasing loss. They, of course refused to pay any additional expenses that we had incurred because of their inability to make accurate decisions in a reasonable amount of time. They said it was my decision to rent space for the items instead of just cramming them into my house where there was no room to work with them and walk through the house at the same time.

In addition, interesting enough, this all happened just a couple of months before our homeowners policy was due for renewal. We were told by the other companies that this claim would follow us and cause an increase in premiums with any other company we chose. We can't figure out why we are going to continue to be punished for an incident that was not only through no fault of our own but didn't even happen on our property.

In spite of the fact that I did much of the work, they still dragged out their first decision until just days AFTER our policy had to be renewed, knowing that another company would not write a policy for us if we had an open claim. So they had us held hostage for another payment. As soon as we were forced to renew the policy, all action stopped on the claim. I was promised paperwork that wasn't sent but the adjuster told me that they were just too busy with other claims. I went by our agent's office to discuss the matter with him but he wasn't there. I left a message but he never called me back.

It was at least couple of more weeks before I heard from them again (and I had to call them to find out what was happening). The adjuster said that they would send me the documentation and the final check. About a week later it arrived. It turned out that the source that their expert had used to evaluate about 90% of the items was Ebay! He valued the three dolls (sold on legitimate sites for several hundred dollars each) at $30 each!. Of course he had been able to find exactly one of each that had been dumped on Ebay for almost nothing. Although Ebay may be a reasonable source for replacement values on household goods that are being sold due to overstock etc., (they usually sell for very close to retail), it is not a reliable source for limited edition collectibles that are no longer being manufactured. They may pop up one time, sell for nothing and never come up again. He also made a lot of substitutions when he had no idea what he was doing. He never asked to see any of the damaged items or even a photo (something which made me suspicious from the beginning). For instance, I had a beautifully detailed and costumed resin sculpture called Old World Father Christmas which stood about 12-14 tall. He substituted a poorly made glass tree ornament of a teddy bear dressed in a Santa suit that sold on Ebay for $4.95. Essentially all of the dolls I lost were in their original boxes with artist certifications. He came back with many that had no boxes or certs and some that were labeled as previously repaired or stained.' Some were so far afield that I have no idea what he was thinking. He obviously took the quickest and laziest possible route that would save Farmers the most money.

We feel that there has to be a fair and expedient way to handle this matter. They say that I can hire my own expert appraiser (at my expense) then we will agree on an umpire who will make the final decision. Then they tell me that they hired the only expert in the area so I checked his credentials. When I went to the website of his certifying agency, I did their search for an appraiser in Colorado who had an expertise in dolls. No names came up, including his. I finally did a personal search on him and found out that one of his specialties is collectibles, an area that encompasses everything from optometrics to decoys (which must include hundreds of subcatagories of each of the 30 areas included in collectibles). His main areas of interest are swords and medallions. I don't see how this qualifies him to evaluate the valuable legacy from my mother. This started on Aug. 14 and still isn't done. .

Jeanne
Colorado Springs, Colorado
U.S.A.

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