But can you take advantage of that in Florida?

Here’s what to know:

Is insurance bundling available in Florida?

• Restrictions: The bundling discount isn’t available to most homeowners in Florida, where market conditions are different than other states, ndustry experts say.

• Savings: “Typically if you bundle your home and auto insurance you could save approximately 20% on each policy, and that’s a big savings,” said Mark Friedlander, director of corporate communications for the Insurance Information Institute. “But in Florida that is very difficult because you typically need to get your auto insurance from a separate carrier than your home insurance because of the way the market is.”

That 20% discount would otherwise translate to yearly savings of more than $1,000, taking into account that homeowners in Florida are paying on average $6,000 per year, nearly four times the national average of $1,700, according to data from the institute.

Why is bundling is restricted in Florida?

• Departures: Florida’s insurance industry is going through a crisis, with companies having left the state or declared bankruptcy. The situation is limiting homeowners who want to shop around for lower premiums, especially in South Florida, where only a handful of companies are writing new policies.

Can insurance companies still in Florida write different policies?

• Limited scope: The challenge of putting all your policies in the hands of one carrier has to do with the type of company offering policies in the state.

• Regional companies: “In Florida, roughly 80% of the market is in the hands of smaller regional insurers that we call monoline insurance companies,” Friedlander said. “And monoline means that they only write one type of business, in this case just residential. They are smaller regional companies and they don’t write auto, they don’t write life or other types of insurance. So it makes it very difficult to bundle.”

• Homeowner policy cutbacks: The practice of offering multi-policy discounts was once common, said Len Bujnicki, working out of Pembroke Pines for the firm We Insure. But then the large national companies that offer multiple coverage began to trim down their homeowners portfolios after a string of Florida hurricanes in recent years.

What about other bundling in Florida?

• Other discounts: The practice still is alive and well in other parts of the business, said Bujnicki. You can still find a national company that can bundle your auto, life or motorcycle policies and save you money, but you will have a much harder time finding one willing to do the same with your homeowners in Florida, he said.

“We are seeing many people doing this,” said Sunem Hernandez, of Hernandez Insurance, an independent insurance agent in Miami Lakes. “I have five clients that have already done it.”

Florida leads the rest of the nation homeowners shedding coverage. According to the Insurance Information Institute, 15% to 20% of Florida homeowners are forgoing coverage, more than the 12% national average.

And the trend is being fueled by the fast increase of insurance costs in the state, the nation’s highest. Florida’s insurance policies — including windstorm coverage, but not flood protection — averaged around $6,000, 42% higher than in 2022, according to the institute.

Agents consulted by the Miami Herald said rates are even higher in South Florida, where the market is said to be in a state of crisis.

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The $6,000 per year amount is really at the bottom of prices being quoted, with homeowners finding few choices given the reluctance of insurance companies to offer coverage in the area.

“I have never seen something like this in the market, not even … Andrew,” said Hernández, referring to the 1992 hurricane that destroyed parts of South Miami-Dade and setting off record-high damage.

Who is going bare?

People ditching their coverage are mostly homeowners who don’t have a mortgage, which requires insurance coverage. Those going bare include homeowners who have paid off their loans in full, including retirees.

But insurance agents say they are now seeing clients acquiring separate loans that do not list the property as collateral, and they use the money to pay off the mortgage to free themselves from the requirement to obtain coverage. For the most part, wealthier people are in a position to borrow large amounts using other types of assets as collateral, such as businesses, stocks and bonds, land, or large bank accounts.

Why do property owners drop their coverage?

Besides the high cost of policies, which is the most obvious reason, surveys by the industry point to cases in which homeowners who don’t have a mortgage cancel policies just because they can.

But the insurance industry’s reputation also plays a role in the decision.

“The insurance industry doesn’t have the most stellar reputation when it comes to pleasing every customer,” Patrick Wraight, director of Insurance Journal’s Academy of Insurance, wrote in a column for Insurance Journal. “This goes back to the complexities of insurance and how sometimes people think a loss should be covered and it just isn’t. It isn’t helpful either that sometimes, insurance people act poorly, incorrectly, and sometimes illegally.”

What to know if you consider dropping insurance coverage

No one is exempt from unforeseen circumstances that can damage or destroy your home. And you’ll be on your own to repair or replace.

gents say that the replacement cost of a home destroyed in a hurricane can surpass $300,000, and even if the dwelling is only partially damaged, you can be left with repairs costing several thousand dollars.

But standard insurance usually protect you from more than damage caused by wind and flooding during a storm, a fire, or other disasters. They also provide liability protection that help you cover the expenses of lawsuits or injuries on the property. Depending on the policy, this type of protection will cover your legal costs and any payments awarded against you in court.

While most of those considering dropping their coverage are thinking of saving money, doing so could mean financial ruin if tragedy strikes — unless they have the money accessible.

Added to the costs of clearing the land of debris, rebuilding the house and finding another place to live in the meantime, a hurricane victim lacking insurance coverage in Florida can easily face expenses surpassing the value of the property.

Does that mean you are being forced to settle for inferior coverage?

Independent insurance agents contacted by the Miami Herald say not at all. For many homeowners, agents say, the insurer of last resort could be the best option.

Here’s what to know about how Citizens stacks up against private insurers:

About a Citizens policy

Only option: Given the number of insurance companies leaving the state — cutting down operations here or simply falling into bankruptcy — many homeowners have no other option but to get coverage from Citizens. In four years, the company’s policies more than tripled, going from little more than 400,000 in 2019 to an estimated 1.4 million by the end of September 2023, according to the company’s website.

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Shedding and transferring policies: Citizens has been growing so furiously in the past few months that the nonprofit insurer has begun a “depopulation” program, working with small new players to transfer some some policies to them, usually at a higher cost for the homeowners.

The change requires homeowners to accept private insurers’ offers of coverage if they’re within 20% of the cost of Citizens premiums.

Florida officials want to move Citizens policies into the private market due to the financial risks associated with major hurricanes. The state is grappling with an insurance crisis, with costs nearly triple the national average. Not all targeted policyholders will be transferred from Citizens to private insurers. But a change approved by the state Legislature in December might push customers away from Citizens.

Rates: Citizens’ premiums are usually lower than those offered by private companies. But that does not mean that the coverage is inferior.

Coverage: “They offer a standard policy. If you have a major disaster, fire, lightning, windstorm, you are covered,” said Randy Marzullo, who works for the firm We Insure in Coral Gables. “They don’t cover certain things. Dogs, for example, are never included in their policy.” And Citizens doesn’t cover screen enclosures, he said.

Policy type: The policy offered by Citizens is a called an HO-3, one of the most common types available in the market.

Payouts: One advantage of a Citizens policy over one from a private company is no limits to payouts for water damage. “They don’t restrict you to that $10,000 cap on water damage that most of the companies have on the older homes,” Marzullo said.

Rate comparisons

Premiums: Citizens’ premiums have been going up in recent years, but at a much lower rate than private companies, some of which have doubled in recent years. That’s due to limits to increases, which have been kept at 15% per year or less.

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The lower premiums put agents representing private companies at a disadvantage. Marzullo said that whenever he gets a new client, he offers different quotes including Citizens, which normally is the lowest.

“You have to always give them a Citizens quote because you don’t want to lose their business because of that rate cap they have. This is a really big issue. Because of course you’re going to go to Citizens, right? Who wants to pay more for insurance?”

But other agents are concerned about the volume of policies being written by the nonprofit company.

Risk: While agreeing that Citizens is offering a standard coverage at a lower rate and also a lesser chance of its premium going up as fast as the policies offered by private companies, there’s usually an unforeseen risk that clients don’t see before signing, said Fermín Acosta, of F. Acosta Insurance Group in Doral.

“We avoid writing policies with Citizens even though the premium is cheaper due to the large number of clients who are already with the company,” Acosta said. “If there is a catastrophe the client is the one who will be affected. Because it will take longer to process the claims.

“There is the concern that Citizen is not going to have a staff large enough to deal with 10,000 people calling all at once to file claims, that they won’t be able to deal with that … and that then the client will spend weeks or months waiting because the process will be very slow and face many delays,” he added.

The ruling issued this week by U.S. District Judge Kevin Michael Moore protects a $34 million Fisher Island mansion and a $14.3 million Collins Avenue property from the efforts of Antonio Caballero to collect on a $140 million, plus interest, settlement awarded for the death of his father at the hands of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) two decades ago.

Caballero had claimed that Gorrín and his brother-in-law and business partner, Gustavo Perdomo, had been laundering money for the FARC.

Gorrín belongs to a small number of Venezuelan businessmen suspected by U.S. officials of earning billions of dollars through their close ties to Maduro and other top dignitaries of the Caracas Socialist regime.

Sanctioned by the Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), Gorrín, the main owner of Venezuelan TV network Globovision was charged in a South Florida federal court for his alleged role in a billion dollar corruption and money laundering scheme in Venezuela and is considered a fugitive by U.S. officials.

While Caballero alleged that Gorrin provided assistance to the FARC, Moore said in his ruling that the plaintiff failed to provide evidence supporting that claim.

The judge found that there “were no facts” suggesting that Gorrín and Perdomo laundered money for Maduro or for the benefit of the FARC, Gorrin’s lawyers said.

“The Court rejected Caballero’s six-degrees-of-separation theory that threatened to label as a terrorist-agent anyone who ever did business with Venezuela,” lawyers Lisandra Guerrero and Howard Srebnick said in the press release.

According to the ruling, Caballero failed to offer evidence about the amount of financial support the FARC allegedly received — directly or indirectly — from Gorrín and Perdomo and also failed to demonstrate how the businessmen assisted the FARC.

“Instead of bolstering his statements with factual support, Plaintiff merely cites numerous pages in expert reports. Yet the expert reports are also full of conclusory statements with little to no factual basis,” the ruling says.

Caballero, who lives in the United States, has been struggling to collect the settlement awarded to him in 2014 for the death of his father in 1999 after he was kidnapped by the FARC.

Gorrín has been among a group of Venezuelan businessmen under investigation by U.S. authorities in Miami since 2016 for allegedly paying millions of dollars in bribes to senior government officials in Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA and the national treasury in exchange for access to energy contracts and currency exchanges that produced massive profits.

He allegedly played a central role in a $1.2 billion corruption scheme involving loans in bolivars acquired by PDVSA from companies allegedly controlled by Venezuelan businessman Francisco Convit and that were repaid almost immediately by the oil company using the highly favorable and exclusive official exchange rate, which granted huge profits, according to the indictment in the case introduced by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida.

But the main case against Gorrín involves accusations that he allegedly participated in a massive money-laundering racket to drain more than $1 billion from Venezuela’s government and launder the illicit money through U.S. banks and luxury real estate investments in New York and South Florida, according to court documents introduced in relation to this second case.

The money-laundering scheme was carried out during a period of extreme economic hardship for many Venezuelans, who have struggled to afford basic necessities such as housing and food under the socialist government.

©2023 Miami Herald. Visit miamiherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.