u/strikecat18

I’m honestly just not sure what the big deal is.

We live in Texas and I don’t tolerate heat well at all. If I do yard work in July, I’d feel ill for the rest of the day. She loves the heat. I do yard work during the cool months. She does it during summer.

She came inside yesterday to find me and my son playing lawn mower simulator and took it as some sort of spiteful act against her?

I’ve told her a million times that I’d be outdoors doing work year round if she’d move to a cooler climate with me.

Regardless, if she was okay mowing, what does the game we were playing matter? It would have been zero drama if we’d been playing Minecraft.

We’ve had a pretty darn good first year. I’ve really enjoyed some parts of this. But this week feels like the universe is telling me to hang up the Airbnb project.

I booked a same-day checkin for today, because it was a returning guest who was great.

Two nights ago, the AC died during the last guests stay. I figured no problem, I’ve fixed a plenty of AC units before. Brought the a portable for the night. Went over the next morning and replaced the contactor and capacitor. System was working.

Got a message hours later. The system less off again, except this time the thermostat had also stopped working.

They checked out today and I went over to troubleshoot the AC while simultaneously having 4 hours for the turnover. It now looks like it’s actually the control board. Of a 3 year old AC system. Which nobody has in stock in town. Delivery is 3-4 days out.

As I discovered that, I went to switch laundry and discovered our 3 year old dryer had also stopped working.

The current guest is amazing and was happy with our backup AC portable units. But now they checked out Sunday and I have three days to do a major AC repair, a dryer repair, and offsite laundry.

I thought I’d be mostly immune from repair projects. It’s a 2022 high-end home with high-end appliances. Despite that, in one year I’ve already replaced a garbage disposal, done a previous repair on the dryer, a repair on the washing machine, replaced an exterior faucet, am still battling with lawn sprinkler issues, and now have the HVAC and dryer on the list.

If I owned four or five Airbnb’s and this was my only job, I’d feel less defeated. But this is my “fun” side business.

I’m just venting. Know this stuff happens to everyone. I’m just tired.

Got a message tonight from our guests. They came back this evening to discover the house was 79 degrees. I went over and checked the HVAC system. Diagnosed it as either the capacitor or contactor. Can get the parts by 11am tomorrow from Amazon, but that still left them in a hot home tonight.

I offered to cancel and refund their remaining 3 nights so they could get a hotel, or to bring over our portable AC until morning. They opted for the portable and seemed perfectly happy with it.

The unit is a 12k BTU dual hose inverter we got from Costco for $389 on sale. It’s legitimately powerful enough to cool our entire downstairs by itself, and had their bedroom back to 72 degrees within 30 minutes.

Already more than paid for itself by saving just the rest of this one reservation. Plus it’s a great backup to have for yourself at home.

Not here to tell a sob story, but it’s been a rough few years. Lost both parents and two siblings. Watched one parent die unexpectedly in front of me. Child diagnosed with a chronic illness. I could potentially die from the same thing as my siblings and had no idea. Plus stress from running two separate businesses and being the only income.

I’m doing… as well as could be expected. But definitely have some PTSD/grief/anxiety stuff I’d love to work through. Have tried four licensed therapists and none of them seems helpful. Want to try an actual psychologist with a Ph.D who might have better tools.

If they accept BCBS that’s great, but it’s not a dealbreaker.

This is apparently a brand new phenomenon that started this month. We all can look forward to dealing with it.

I have a customer who has a total loss a couple weeks ago. Upside down and no gap coverage. As soon as we offered a payoff amount, the lender emailed the insured asking for consent to challenge the number on her behalf. From that point forward, our claims department has been spammed by automated messages and useless comps 2-3x a day. Today they sent her an appraisal clause request to Docusign.

The number they are claiming for the valuation is *absurd*. Like $11k over KBB good condition.

The insured called me today and basically said “My lender asked if I was okay with this and I said sure. But I’m getting copied on all these emails every day and am not feeling like this is normal. I was okay with the original offer.”

I called the adjuster to talk it out with them. The adjuster let me know Westlake Financial and some other lenders are now challenging every single total loss like this, both with and without gap coverage. He said they are spamming comps from all over the country, from different trim vehicles, etc. He also said they are invoking the appraisal clause on most of them.

Apparently, our preferred appraisal companies went from a 2-3 day wait a few weeks ago to being scheduled *6 weeks* into the future now. That’s how much of this is going on.

Depending how hands-on you are with claims, this sounds like something we’ll all be seeing more of.

#1 - Customers for whiplash from the rate changes and UW changes during and after Covid. We were too aggressive with the rate decreases in the midst of the pandemic, didn’t account for the inflation everyone else projected coming, and then had to then panic and take large increases repeatedly. Alongside the rate changes, our losses in 22/23 caused us to non renew or decline tons of customers we then wanted back a year later. To be fair, current leadership had nothing to do with this.

#2 - As the company has pivoted to IPS, the emphasis leadership has placed on P&C has continued to decline. When the only metric your sales leader or VPA discusses with you is life & IPS, agents who want to be given opportunities take their foot off the gas on auto and home. Meanwhile, auto is 100% of the competition’s focus.

#3 - Agents are still lacking in the basic technology that would help them make informed business decisions. For example, we can promote ourselves and run Google ads, but we can’t direct them anywhere that allows us to track those specific opportunities and calculate outcomes or ROI. We get SF.com leads, but have no way to differentiate what source those were derived from.

I’m interested if anyone agrees or disagrees. I just happen to believe that our basic business model isn’t to blame, and nor is our expense ratio or a need for broadly hurrying new technology.

I’m old now, but was a former state officer / chapter president / national event winner. Just found out NLC is happening right in my backyard next week.

Would be really cool to judge one of my old events (business plan & job interview). I emailed the general contact form on the website, but realize that probably isn’t checked daily.

Long story short, we live in Texas. Our power went out at noon today and the power company didn’t offer a restoration time estimate. Heat index was about 105 today.

I had just checked in guests to our Airbnb an hour earlier, so that was out as a fallback.

My immediate plan shifted to “surely there has to be a host around here, with electricity, who would allow a one night stay from another host.”

Then I realized our pets would need to come with. 😂

Thankfully the power came back on a few hours later before we all stroked out. But my curiosity peaked if there’s any scenario where I could have convinced someone let us pay an extra deposit and actually give us a place to stay.

Our signature system has to be the most antiquated and frustrating part of our tech. There are so may things that still require wet signatures. And it’s not even important things. It’s just the things where nobody has bothered to add the e-sign option for.

I just lost a life policy because the amendment got lost in the mail and there was no time left to turn around a paper sig.

Every other company on the planet lets agents just drop documents into Docusign. If I can enter a contact for real estate that way, surely it’s good enough for us?

As someone hired to fix our tech, I would think this would be a great, easy improvement with a big return.

I spoke with Smart Financial last week because I could use another source to supplement my office’s quote volume.

Leads are $10 each. They are claiming a 3-5% close rate based on the internal agent dashboard results they can see.

I started to build a spreadsheet out to model both 3% and 5% scenarios, using my average new policy auto premium.

After paying between $200 and $330 for the sale, and paying my sales guy out on it, my break even would be like 1.5 to 2.5 years. 2.5 years is longer than the average customer lifespan for the internet leads we have previously written.

I’d say “well, we make money by selling additional lines of coverage” normally. But the customer quality on internet leads is usually renters.

It’s been a long time since I’ve run internet leads at any volume. Are any of you actually tracking ROI and coming out ahead on these?

Serious question. Nicotine pouches are exploding in popularity and I’ve already run into issues with UW on a couple people because of them.

There is decades of evidence from Europe that nicotine pouches don’t present any of the risks that smoking or even vaping do. Bundling those things together just because their labs show nicotine is not actuarially sound.

I’m curious if companies will just accept that they are losing this many relatively low risk people in their rating practice.