Why aren't more retiring in Houston?

[W2R]

I don't remember all of the details but Texas has a provision that uses "10 years of events" to calculate rates. That's going to hit pretty hard when it comes through next year.

Katrina got Texas to separate "wind storm" (guess what that is) from normal homeowner's insurance. There was a semi-arbitrary line drawn along the coast to differentiate where separate "wind storm" insurance was required. These were reinsured through multiple world wide insurance groups. State Farm uses Lloyds of London.

This separate policy didn't lower the normal home insurance but it cost as much or more than the other policy. It wasn't unusual to get hit with an extra $1,500 or $2,000 in cost to live along the coast.

Until 2 years ago, DW and I had a house about 100 feet from the magic line. Fortunately, we were on the right side of it. That line may get redrawn soon. I think our old house was flooded based on TV pictures I've seen but I didn't see our exact property.

After Katrina, new "wind and hail" policies were not available in New Orleans and insurance companies did all they could to drop wind and hail coverage from the homeowners' policies (within state regulations). If your policy was less than 3 years old, or if you had made 3 claims in 5 years they could drop it, and a lot of tricks were reported in which they required new policies for minor changes and then used that as a way around state regulations. Frank's policy was dropped since it was less than 3 years old, and now he has to pay more like $2200 or something extra for his wind and hail policy in addition to his homeowners' policy which is almost that much. No insurance company would touch wind and hail, so it's the "Louisiana Fair" state coverage.

I did not get my "wind and hail" removed from my policy, but they imposed a mandatory 5% deductible. That's still pretty good, since I don't have to pay for Louisiana Fair, but 5% probably is not enough to pay even partly for a new roof, for example. My homeowners' including wind and hail went up around $200 (ballpark, I do not have the figures here).

From what I understand, Florida has had similar insurance difficulties since Charlie/Frances/Ivan/Jeanne in 2004.

 

[2B]

OK, now we've heard from LOL, 2B, Htown Harry, and Leonidas.

Who else is on the Houston roll call? Any major damage?

We also need to put together a lunch or dinner for Nords and company's visit. I'm going to be out of town starting Friday for at least a week and maybe two. I'll have limited computer access or I'd volunteer to do the setup. Any volunteers?

 

[TeeRuh]

OK, now we've heard from LOL, 2B, Htown Harry, and Leonidas.

Who else is on the Houston roll call? Any major damage?

TeeRuh checking in. Just got power back 3 hrs ago. Water back yesterday afternoon. New realization of how neat that indoor plumbing gig can be! Pretty much the usual tree (lots of tree damage) and fence damage. My satellite dish blew off of the chimney and was just given an October 4th timeslot for repair. Ouch (football season). Guess there must have been a few other dishes sailing along Friday night ...

Life is good! (Trying to ignore the 300 point market drop.)

t.r.

 

[Nords]

We also need to put together a lunch or dinner for Nords and company's visit. I'm going to be out of town starting Friday for at least a week and maybe two. I'll have limited computer access or I'd volunteer to do the setup. Any volunteers?

Leonidas & Htown Harry & I have also been swapping PMs and looking at various shopping centers, but I guess any plans would've been disrupted by storm damage.

We've been waiting until things calm down to check on hotel reservations and our Rice appointments, but we should have things back on track by the end of the week. Keep an eye on your PMs and I should have more of a clue by this Thursday.

 

[2B]

Leonidas & Htown Harry & I have also been swapping PMs and looking at various shopping centers, but I guess any plans would've been disrupted by storm damage.

We've been waiting until things calm down to check on hotel reservations and our Rice appointments, but we should have things back on track by the end of the week. Keep an eye on your PMs and I should have more of a clue by this Thursday.

That's great. You're coordinating it yourself.

 

[Sarah in SC]

Off both topics on the table, but they just changed our SC Wind pool (for wind and hail coverage) to cover a greater part of Charleston county, so a lot of folks got giant increases in the costs of just their W&H coverage.
Made me grateful that we moved off the beach and now don't carry Wind and Hail or Flood where we live. Huge savings!

 

[Nords]

Off both topics on the table, but they just changed our SC Wind pool (for wind and hail coverage) to cover a greater part of Charleston county, so a lot of folks got giant increases in the costs of just their W&H coverage.

Haven't seen hail around here in a very long time, and the thought of it falling on our photovoltaic array does not make me happy!

 

[2B]

Off both topics on the table, but they just changed our SC Wind pool (for wind and hail coverage) to cover a greater part of Charleston county, so a lot of folks got giant increases in the costs of just their W&H coverage.
Made me grateful that we moved off the beach and now don't carry Wind and Hail or Flood where we live. Huge savings!

Am I spelling Missouri correctly?

 

[Notmuchlonger]

Am I spelling Missouri correctly?

Misery?


jk

 

[2soon2tell]

DW and I were very lucky and had no damage. Lost power Fri midnight until Sat evening around 8. I slept through part of the storm but DW stayed up all night. No flooding in our area (Sugar Land) but a lot of trees and fences were destroyed. Our phone and DSL service was just restored this afternoon and I think I was suffering from internet withdrawal.

We used our generator for the first time and it worked very well. Just enough juice for a small window a/c unit, fridge, small TV and a fan. Friends are now using the gen as their power is still out. Life goes on.

2soon2tell

 

[audreyh1]

Haven't seen hail around here in a very long time, and the thought of it falling on our photovoltaic array does not make me happy!

We've gotten pretty big hail (1.5" or so) hit the roof of our RV a couple of times. Enough to put fine cracks in some of the plastic and some dings in our car roof. But our 50W solar panel seems impervious as does the fiberglass roof itself. Sure is frightfully noisy inside the RV though! We usually run to a bathroom building when a major hailstorm gets close.

Audrey

 

[Orchidflower]

Audreyh1, are you in the Sugarland, Texas, area? I have heard that they get hail there the size of golf balls. I always wanted to just see that, but the best we had in Bellaire, inside the city of Houston, was hail the size of nickles. Unique experience I would just love to see once.
Got a call from a friend who was in Houston over the hurricane. Said it was just downright eerie there afterward (whatever that means). Told me he had to get 6 gas containers for gas as he was afraid he would run out before he got to DFW on the way home, and all the gas stations were closed on his route. True?

 

[Sarah in SC]

I can't remember the last time we got hail in our part of (pssst, 2B) South Carolina, but they always lump it with wind coverage for the high-risk pool. I don't think I've got anything that would be that hugely damaged by hail around our place. I would hate to imagine it in the RV, though! Just a rainstorm is loud enough in our tin can.

 

[audreyh1]

Audreyh1, are you in the Sugarland, Texas, area? I have heard that they get hail there the size of golf balls. I always wanted to just see that, but the best we had in Bellaire, inside the city of Houston, was hail the size of nickles. Unique experience I would just love to see once.
Got a call from a friend who was in Houston over the hurricane. Said it was just downright eerie there afterward (whatever that means). Told me he had to get 6 gas containers for gas as he was afraid he would run out before he got to DFW on the way home, and all the gas stations were closed on his route. True?

Nope. Central Texas "The Hill Country" can get pretty nasty hailstorms in the spring.

Audrey

 

[LOL!]

...
Got a call from a friend who was in Houston over the hurricane. Said it was just downright eerie there afterward (whatever that means). Told me he had to get 6 gas containers for gas as he was afraid he would run out before he got to DFW on the way home, and all the gas stations were closed on his route. True?

No, it is not true. Dallas is about 250 miles from Houston, so it should take him only 10 gallons of gas to get there or about 2/3rds of the typical 15 gallon tank that a car has. He didn't have to get any extra gas containers at all.

 

[haha]

No, it is not true. Dallas is about 250 miles from Houston, so it should take him only 10 gallons of gas to get there or about 2/3rds of the typical 15 gallon tank that a car has. He didn't have to get any extra gas containers at all.

Dallas is so far from Houston that you have to make frequent side trips to load up on barbecue. That is likely why he needed so much gas.

Ha

 

[Orchidflower]

Haha, that is even funnier than you know as the guy is morbidly obese. You must know him?
I think he was just afraid the hurricane would head to DFW as it did show on tv weathercasts even here that it initially might swing that way. It didn't, and went way back to Louisiana instead I think.

 

[Bestwifeever]

Waiting to hear from my brother, whose house is (or "was") in Bridge City, TX--90 percent of the town was covered with water. He and his family did go to Dallas (but is not morbidly obese ).

Photos here: KOGT Photo Gallery- powered by SmugMug

 

[Nords]

We just got back from our three-day [-]blitz[/-] Houston trip to visit Rice U.

Much more student-friendly and more intimate than Notre Dame's 7000+ students. Our kid was a just as sure that she was going to Notre Dame as she used to be positive that she was going to USNA. However now she's been totally seduced by the image of being a Mighty Fighting Owl (or, as REW would say, a MFO). Rice had a great admissions brief followed by a good tour, and a student took her to lunch & class. The visit was exactly what she needed to be able to look around and say "Yeah, I could do this." She's totally jazzed and motivated to study for her next set of SATs.

I like the idea of college in warmer weather (except perhaps July & August) and an urban environment instead of a frozen wasteland cornfield. Having a bunch of Fortune 500 corporations within stone's throw for research projects and internships doesn't hurt either, and the Rice NROTC unit claims that they get treated better than ND. Rice's NROTC seems to work fine-- unlike ND, Rice is so hard to get into that Navy rubber-stamps the scholarship application. Last year Rice didn't admit any NROTC applicants, and an entire NROTC class of 13 students is made up of mids from other campuses.

Of course it's easy to love Houston in October when it's a bit brisk in the morning and quite temperate the rest of the day. One day was utterly & completely blue sky with not a speck of clouds. But there was some mild concern in the hotel about a rainy day, because most of their roof is blue tarps and there's already a couple pallets of drywall in the hallways. The only other remaining visible hurricane damage in urban Houston seems to be an occasional plywood window and piles of curbside tree branches. Rice was being groomed by platoons of groundskeepers, every tree had a mulch layer a foot thick, and every barbecue grill was well-stocked with kindling & firewood. Everywhere I looked, both at Rice and the adjacent medical complex, I saw building cranes.

Central Houston's rush-hour traffic truly sucks, but unfortunately that's just my provincial standards. A 16-mile crawl in Hawaii is a freakin' cataclysmic disaster, but around Houston it seems to be commuter business as usual. After nearly two decades of Hawaii driving I found the speed limits and following distances to be pretty exciting. A truck kicked up a rock that put a dime-size chip in the passenger side of our front windshield, so [-]Dis[/-]Advantage car rental and I are going to have even more to talk about soon.

Only once during the entire trip did I hear "All y'all are from Hawaya an' yer vacationin' hee-yur?" That's a new record.

I had a great BBQ dinner with 2B, 2Soon2Tell, Htown Harry, and Leonidas. Thanks again for the hospitality, guys! After several hours of detailed analysis we developed a plan to fix the stock market. We began implementation this morning (Friday 10 Oct), but the rest of Wall Street will need a few more weeks to recognize our prescience and get onboard. Patience.

In the meantime our kid is looking into chigger repellent and scorpion anti-venin treatement...

 

[2B]

Central Houston's rush-hour traffic truly sucks, but unfortunately that's just my provincial standards. A 16-mile crawl in Hawaii is a freakin' cataclysmic disaster, but around Houston it seems to be commuter business as usual.

I had a great BBQ dinner with 2B, 2Soon2Tell, Htown Harry, and Leonidas. Thanks again for the hospitality, guys! After several hours of detailed analysis we developed a plan to fix the stock market. We began implementation this morning (Friday 10 Oct), but the rest of Wall Street will need a few more weeks to recognize our prescience and get onboard. Patience.

Nords,

It was great having you show up and I enjoyed meeting my fellow forum memeber.

It isn't your provincial standards in judging the traffic. The traffic has been horrible around Houston since I first arrived in 1973. Around the Galleria is the worst of the worst. The West Loop around the Galleria is supposedly part of the freeway system but more closely resembles a parking lot from 4am to 8 pm (commute times).

I've always handled the traffic by working and living on the fringes. We recently moved from Clear Lake to Katy when I got a better j*b 3 years ago in Katy. I commuted 50 miles each way for about 3 months and it was just about enough to kill me. There are people that travel farther than that for decades. I think they are nuts. You experienced the joy of I-45 a few times so you get the idea.

We certainly have better BBQ than the Galleria food court but it worked out well for your DW and DD to have an opportunity to escape the forum "reunion." I think I was the only one that met them so they probably weren't too tramatized.

I called the market bottom on Friday. I'm sticking with my prediction unless it goes down Monday. You were traveling most of the time so you didn't have the "in your face" experience of watching the market dump all week. Lucky stiff.

 

[Orchidflower]

Lucky Nords...watching the market go down did nothing for me, but give me heart palpitations. Fun times.
Your kid will love Rice, and I cannot encourage her more. It is the finest. She'll get used to the humidity and heat, and won't melt.
And, as you noticed, Houston is booming. Lots of construction going on since I left in '03, but plenty was happening even then, too.
Houston is predicted--according to the tv stations in Chicago when I lived there one year in 2003-2004--to overtake the population of Chicago within 10 years. Now, being 2008, that should be like 6 years.
The only big downside to all this is with the Katrina victims coming to Houston a few years ago, crime boomed 40% up. Now we have all the Galveston victims. Trust me, most of Galveston was composed of the poor-poor. In fact, it was really a few haves and many, many, many have nothing at alls; so, I am wondering what the affect will be on crime now that this latest hurricane has happened. Watch that.
I lived in Bellaire, which is bike riding distance from Rice. She will love it. It's beautiful over there. Thumbs up is my vote, Nords!
***Oh, yeah...and the only people who sound twangy when they talk in Houston are people from outside Houston proper. Trust me, the Houstonians sound Midwestern, more or less, with really no noticeable accent at all. Dan Rather (the tv anchor) is from Houston, for example. Don't feel surprised about what Houston is really like as my ex- thought he would see tumbleweeds rolling thru the center of town...oh brother! Inner-city Chicago boy...what can I say

 

[Bestwifeever]

Glad your daughter had a good visit, Nords. The mild Houston winters vs. the Midwest weren't the reason my daughter became an Owl, but they certainly grew on her! Fingers crossed that your daughter gets in everywhere she applies and then has the pleasant dilemma of choosing which school to go to.

 

[2B]

As for the heat and humidity....

I didn't really mind it for decades. Now that I'm getting to almost be an old codger, it's really draining.

When my father used to visit when in his 70's, he wouldn't leave the house after 10 am. He kept saying it was too hot to go anywhere. I'm now starting to see what he meant.

 

[2soon2tell]

Heat in Houston, What heat. I'm 62, 1.5 yrs past cancer surgery, chemo and radiation treatment and I walk 5-10 miles 4 to 5 days a week in this heat. I can't run anymore but I can walk and I will be fast walking the Houston half marathon in Jan.

Seriously, the Houston heat does sap your energy and my DW has trouble in the summer. I do believe you can somewhat adapt by being outside when it is cooler in the AM or later in the evening when the humidity is lower but the temp is higher. We also try to follow the standard advice of wearing light clothing and drinking lots of fluids. With all of these precautions it sometimes feels like I am dragging lead weights around in the summer.

As they say in Texas we don't have to shovel the humidity and its the price we pay for our mild winters.

 

[Orchidflower]

When I used to walk fast or sprint around Memorial Park, which is a 3 mile cinder track everyone uses (i.e., I ran into George H.W. Bush, lots of boxing pros, the Judge on Texas Justice, etc. etc.), I had to leave by 6:30 am latest after May--because, by 8 a.m.--it was just tooo darn hot and humid to walk. Welcome to the reality of Houston heat and humidity!