Insurance help! My rates have jumped thru the roof
 

Hi there. I am a Kansas carrier and hopefully somebody can point me in right direction. My rates currently are about $17,784/year for 3 trucks. This was 500 mile radius insurance. Well I am trying to rewrite my policy to cover what I need and wow. I have changed from 500 mile radius to unlimited radius and added reefer breakdown. The typical $1,000,000 liability, $100,000 cargo with $100,000 reefer breakdown. I have '09 Cascadia, '04 Century and '97 Century. Well my problem is they want to raise rates from the above $17,784/year to $39,000-$45,000 (depending on writer)/year. I had a $6,400 deer hit claim (prior to last renewal though), $5,900 claim when driver backed into another truck in truckstop, $3,400 when driver ripped landing gear off trailer. Only large claim was '09 laid over in September '13. Roughly with tow, cargo, physical damage its about $80,000 claim. My saferstats have been dropping since February and my HOS have fell tremendously. They wrote current policy in March '13 after my safety scores reached their highest. Anybody have any places to point me on insurance because $39k-$45k/year for 3 trucks isn't realistic. Thank you!

With the claims you've had, the insurance companies haven't broken even on you yet. It's going to be tough.

go to kw trucks fk frieghtshakers haha only a joke

Try OOIDA, tho i agree with no worries, it's going to be tough.

OOIDA isn't recognized by about 5 brokers I use so will not work :(. Looks like going to have to bite the bullet for a year and hopefully no claims and safety scores continue climbing. Then I'm sure rates will come back to reasonable.

Pretty high loss ratio. Be happy that someone will even take it. Forget your company CSA, how bad are the drivers from past employers? Past accidents from them? MVR's? How much experience do you require?

Sometimes you have to get rid of drivers to lower insurance. Still have the driver with the layover?

Yes I do. He's only driver I have with anything on record, the rest are spotless with no wrecks or tickets. One driver is 10 years experience, one has 8 and other has 20. Think I'm going to just get it done and roll hard. Hopefully nothing happens claims wise this year and next renewal it drops substantially.

I personally require 2 years in past 3 minimum.

If that's the case, then it's purely your claims history that's hurting you; improvement there is purely a function of time. Keep your nose clean and things should improve, especially the further you get from that layover. It wouldn't hurt to shop around. There are more carriers in this space than people realize and they will often be very competitive on a new policy in order to lure a new customer. It certainly takes time to gather the quotes, but if you could save even $5000 it would be well worth it.

I am shopping no doubt.