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Farmers Insurance Laying Off 11% of Workforce, Citing Industry Challenges

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Re: Farmers Insurance Laying Off 11% of Workforce, Citing Industry Challenges

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Oklahoma. Contrary to popular belief, getting your house destroyed by a tornado is unlikely. But hailstorms are on the rise and roof replacements are becoming more frequent because of them. Insurance has gone up A LOT for everyone, regardless of insurer, and for me despite installing hail resistant shingles last time. I am wondering what happens when people here can no longer afford insurance even though th…

Upvote for HNers in Oklahoma!

ha one for you too then!

Re: Farmers Insurance Laying Off 11% of Workforce, Citing Industry Challenges

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What they are really saying is that they can’t effectively model the risk. Say you were an insurer… would you want to take risk for Florida hurricane losses knowing what we know? If we want a functional insurance market in these places, we need a student loan type solution - make the Feds the reinsurer and have the insurance company mostly administer the policy.

Floridians who want me to shoulder the bill for insuring their beachfront property against hurricane damage can go to hell. Pay for the insurance yourself or move to a place where disasters aren’t common.

This is such an American reply and one that as a European, I find mildly amusing.

Where do you live that’s so safe and disasters are uncommon and aren’t on the increase?

Everywhere will have different risk factors, the American attitude seems to be ‘I won’t pay for anyone else, even if it means I ultimately will have to pay more’.

Re: Farmers Insurance Laying Off 11% of Workforce, Citing Industry Challenges

#123
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose you are an insurer. You model the risk for your insurance product (suppose it's car insurance) and realize you need to charge $100/mo to make money after paying out all the claims. However, you have a competitor that is bad at modeling risk. They are charging $50/mo for their car insurance, and customers are flocking to them. Should you attempt to stay in this market? If you lower your prices, you will eventu…

> after you pay for marketing There should be no marketing if it's mandated. These companies should not be run for profit since having insurance is required by law in many situations.

[flagged]

Re: Farmers Insurance Laying Off 11% of Workforce, Citing Industry Challenges

#124
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose you are an insurer. You model the risk for your insurance product (suppose it's car insurance) and realize you need to charge $100/mo to make money after paying out all the claims. However, you have a competitor that is bad at modeling risk. They are charging $50/mo for their car insurance, and customers are flocking to them. Should you attempt to stay in this market? If you lower your prices, you will eventu…

> after you pay for marketing There should be no marketing if it's mandated. These companies should not be run for profit since having insurance is required by law in many situations.

You’re describing socialism and we are operating in a capitalist society. I’m not advocating for or against but it’s naive to make these claims about how this should just be pure, devoid of evil and provided by the state. This debate will go on until the end of days.

Re: Farmers Insurance Laying Off 11% of Workforce, Citing Industry Challenges

#125
Is this a side effect of low interest rates not allowing the traditional investment returns expected for the risk? Largely these folks held commercial real estate and bonds.

I keep thinking the near zero interest rates messed up a lot of things, and we’ll continue to see them pop up for the next few years.

Re: Farmers Insurance Laying Off 11% of Workforce, Citing Industry Challenges

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Oklahoma. Contrary to popular belief, getting your house destroyed by a tornado is unlikely. But hailstorms are on the rise and roof replacements are becoming more frequent because of them. Insurance has gone up A LOT for everyone, regardless of insurer, and for me despite installing hail resistant shingles last time. I am wondering what happens when people here can no longer afford insurance even though th…

It's more that those states are becoming the most expensive to maintain intact houses in , with the increased insurance a side effect of that. I know someone in TX that has needed a new roof like 6-7 times in 10 years because of hail damage - the insurance company has been bleeding money on their house for a decade, but that's because the house has actually been sustaining significant damage every single year. The on…

I think I am paying 3500/year now, up from 2800. My house is on the larger side (4 bedrooms), so far, I've had 2 roofs (one on my prior smaller house) in 20+ years. For me it's been 1 roof every 10 years. But I know someone who got a roof replaced and it was immediately destroyed again by a second storm. I on the other hand, fought with State Farm for 6 months about some dumb piece of metal that was dented. So, while we got hit by the second storm and likely sustained more damage, it didn't matter.

It's becoming more difficult to find a place to live that does not have some potential issue, be it water, weather, heat, cold, earthquakes.... supervolcanos :)

Re: Farmers Insurance Laying Off 11% of Workforce, Citing Industry Challenges

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not seeing many successful CEO-less companies. When you start your democratic/committee-led company, please let us know.

I'll assume you are arguing in good faith, but I doubt it, considering your tone. I did not say anything about a leaderless company. I said that the current perceived value of C-suite contributor is way over-inflated. That culture can and should change.

Ok, let's look at how a bad CEO can affect a company. When Zuckerberg decided to pursue the Metaverse, he took Meta's market cap from $1.1T in September '21 to $244B in October '22. 1 year, $850 billion in value destroyed. So, it should be clear now that one person can have a lot of power over the business. How much should they be compensated when they wield that much power? I'm guessing you think it's less than $1M per year.

Re: Farmers Insurance Laying Off 11% of Workforce, Citing Industry Challenges

#128

All I see in the article is the discussion of "profits". I would think the PR department could come up with something about "trying to keep costs competitive for our customers" or something like that. Instead they're telling California and Florida customers to take a hike ... along with 11% of their employees. When is the last time we heard a company enact a company-wide, 50% cut in officer's salaries and a freeze on…

In the distant past, insurance companies used actuaries to price policies, so that the companies could make informed, rational decisions like "for people in this risk category, if we want to make X% profit, how much do we need to charge for that coverage?" Instead it became "insurance company M is charging $N for this type of policy, we have to charge something similar or else our customers would switch." Along comes Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and years of 'selling policies at a price point instead of using actuarial math to determine what the real cost would be' turned into a major disaster as it turned out that dozens of insurance companies were selling policies below the actual cost of those policies. Most of those insurance companies went out of business. 30 years later, and most insurance companies are still making bad decisions.

My point, and I think there is one in here, is that insurance companies have been making terrible decisions based on marketing instead of basing them on what the actual risks involved are.

California's fires and Florida's weather are a lot more risky than people are willing to admit. Some coastal states have passed laws prohibiting the consideration of climate change in insurance and governmental decisions. Those states are also seeing insurance companies performing strategic withdrawals from those markets. But they aren't as big as CA & FL, therefore they don't get the media attention.

Re: Farmers Insurance Laying Off 11% of Workforce, Citing Industry Challenges

#129
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There already is a federal program for uninsurable properties (for flooding only, I believe). They take whatever insurers reject. By my understanding, people just keep building on the same spot, even if it floods constantly, therefore they are a huge drain on the program. I don’t see a solution honestly. With global warming large parts of the world will become uninsurable. And we shouldn’t expect insurance companies/…

A lot of these people are stuck in the situation. While they can get flood insurance to rebuild the property, they can't afford to abandon the property, and they can't find anyone to sell it to. So they are in a cycle of rebuilding the property, waiting for a flood, then rebuilding it again. There is a pretty obvious solution in my mind: The federal government offers homeowners a buyout for them to move out of that p…

So rather than having insurance customers in other states subsidize Floridian homeowners so they can replace their property after damage, you'd rather have taxpayers in all states subsidize Floridian homeowners to buy out their homes? That's the same thing with extra steps, except now people who bought bad properties walk away with a nice bag of cash.

Re: Farmers Insurance Laying Off 11% of Workforce, Citing Industry Challenges

#130
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major example of this was the decline of Intel (that they are trying to reverse) that was driven by an inane diversion of $$ by accountants who spent billions on 'share buybacks' instead of R&D = the inexorable fall from grace. I have never understood this buyback philosophy and spoke against it(my whispers in a hurricane). It was done to increase the share price - it failed, buckets with no bottoms are hard to fil…

> I have never understood this buyback philosophy and spoke against it(my whispers in a hurricane) Buybacks come from net income (profit). A business always has a choice of using the profit to pay the business’s owners (via dividend or buybacks) or to invest it back into the business (such as spending on R&D). Obviously, what portion of the profit is ideal to spend on R&D and what portion of the profit to pay to owne…

>Buybacks come from net income (profit)

Never confuse the textbook economics with the reality of individual incentives. Company management used the low interest rate environment of the recent past to borrow money that was then used in buybacks. Executive management generally is in a no-lose situation with regard to compensation, there may be long-term incentives, but the CEO generally can exit within the term of their employment contract with a sizable payout even if they blow up the company. The board is supposed to prevent such tactics, but US corporate governance is largely about cross-pollinating memberships so that CEOs can all vote 'yes' on each other's pay packages.

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