Should You Keep Insurance after a Job Loss?

After losing a job, you will likely consult your budget and try to find ways to reduce your cost of living during this unexpected and financially challenging period. Unfortunately, many individuals look at their various insurance policy premiums as acceptable expenses to cut. They may begin the process by increasing deductibles and lowering limits in order to adjust premiums down. Then, they may chop out various “optional” benefits within their policies and finally, they allow coverage such as life insurance, which isn’t required by the state or a lender, to lapse through non-payment of premiums.

Treating insurance coverage this way can be one way to reduce immediate expenses, although it’s an activity that can be financially devastating over the long haul. The less insurance coverage you have, the more risk you bear; and after a job loss, you can’t afford any additional financial risk.

Why maintain life insurance? Your family needs life insurance in order to keep their financial lives together after a loss. When you lose a job, your financial position becomes even more unstable, so leaving your family without a life insurance benefit can be devastating. Instead, find out if your insurance company can do an applied premium loan and utilize some of your cash value to make premium payments.

Why not reduce auto insurance coverage? It will be difficult to find a new job, and get to one if you are offered a position, if you don’t have a car. Without car insurance to pay for damages after an accident, or with a high deductible that puts more pressure on you to pay for repair costs, you could be sabotaging your ability to get a job and remain employed again. Not to mention the risk of liability you take on, which can easily wipe out retirement and other savings.

Do you really need that much home insurance? It’s hard enough to imagine how you could afford to replace all your property and rebuild your home after an insurable event that occurs while you are employed, but imagine having to do so when you are unemployed.

Can you put health insurance on hold? Your health is your most precious asset. Without it you can’t work, enjoy your family or have a happy, fulfilled life. The ability to have serious problems detected early and to continue receiving preventative and emergency care measures is vital when you are unemployed. In addition, keeping continuous coverage ensures that your pre-existing conditions won’t be excluded by certain new plans.

If you have questions about how to continue with your Oklahoma City Insurance policies after a job loss, or how to replace those coverages lost after a job loss, give us a call at Strunk Insurance today.

Insurance: The Secret Weapon of an Effective Savings Plan

For many individuals and families, it is difficult to find the financial footing to start saving for emergencies, vacations, and retirement. With the cost of living rising and paychecks not always keeping pace, savings have become an even more precious asset to protect.

While you might think of insurance as a product that protects “things”, it actually protects your savings because it prevents you from needing to use your personal assets to pay for lost or damaged possessions and liability claims.

Your Property as an Investment

When you buy small ticket items like clothes, accessories and certain electronics, you might not think of them as investments but they are. Often, discretionary dollars are used to make the purchases, which is money that could have been used for savings instead of spending.

Whenever you spend money, you are making an investment. You are trading long hours of work for a product meant to improve your life in some way. By having the proper insurance on the item, whether through home insurance, flood insurance or auto insurance, you give yourself protection like other investors dream of. With your insurance, you’ll be made whole after a loss; and that means you won’t need to tap into your savings.

Liability Protection

Everyone is exposed to potential liabilities. From having a loose walkway stone that causes a neighbor to trip, to running a stoplight and hitting someone, to damaging your neighbor’s mailbox while backing out of your driveway. These are just a few examples of how you face many situations each day that could result in a liability claim.

Liability insurance coverage and umbrella policies help ensure that if you are sued, you won’t suffer financial damages beyond your deductible and those that exceed your limits.

For Your Heirs

Life insurance offers a great way to preserve your savings for your loved ones. Death benefit proceeds can help pay for estate tax liabilities and other expenses after you’re gone. This will ensure that the money you worked hard to save goes to your heirs after death.

When creating your savings plan, you’ll spend a lot of time on your budget. You’ll figure out what expenses to cut and how much to put into certain savings accounts. One of the biggest mistakes you can make though, is to ignore potential shortfalls in your insurance policies. With too little, or nonexistent coverage, you may find that your savings doesn’t stand a chance at accumulating.

Contact an agent at Strunk Insurance to make sure your Oklahoma City Insurance policy is going to protect you in the event of a loss.

Supplementing Your ID Theft Insurance Policy

With the continuing emergence of new ways to steal your identity, ID theft insurance offers a lot of comfort to those who choose to add it to their insurance portfolio. Better still, would be to never have to use the many benefits that ID theft insurance offers you.

Using the following easy steps as a supplement to your ID theft insurance policy is a great way to reduce the likelihood of encountering the frustrating, and damaging, event of identity theft.

• Use only secured internet connections to ensure that identity thieves can’t get your sensitive information. Entering sensitive information only into sites with secured connections, represented by the HTTPS in the address bar. An unsecured connection will simply show HTTP prior to the web address.
• Manually enter web addresses of all sensitive sites. If you get an email from your bank or other financial institution urging you to click an in-email link to clarify your sensitive data, do not click the link. This could be a phishing email meant to look as though it’s from your financial institution when it is really sent by a third party. As soon as you click through the link, the third party will direct you to an address that stores your data for thieves. Instead, always type in the web address for your bank and other financial sites.
• Shred all of your statements. Your statements reveal many items of information about you that an identity thief could use. Shred those and all other documents with sensitive information, including bills and medical documents which could contain your social security number.
• If possible, don’t carry credit cards. Stolen credit cards can lead to identity theft. Only carry a credit card when you know that you need to use it that day. Minimizing how often you carry these cards reduces the likelihood that they will be stolen. On vacation, opt for travelers cheques instead of always using your credit card. You may not be able to re-coop the loss if the cheques are stolen, but it costs you far less than losing your identity.
• Close unused credit accounts. If you no longer use a credit account, and you don’t need to keep it open to help your FICO score, then close it and destroy the card.

ID theft insurance protection helps to make you whole after your identity is stolen. It can’t prevent the theft from occurring, but it can help you work towards getting it back. For information on your Oklahoma City Insurance policy, contact Strunk Insurance today.

What Makes HIPAA So Important

When you have a pre-existing condition, it can be difficult to get insurance coverage. If you delay obtaining insurance coverage until you know you are sick and need treatment, it is an action referred to by insurers as adverse selection. It is adverse because in order for insurance to work with existing premium payment structures, it cannot be purchased only by individuals with costly medical treatment expenses. Insurance must be purchased by a large number of individuals in order to protect against the potential of a serious illness or injury.

One way that health insurance companies protect themselves from adverse selection is to create pre-existing condition exclusions that allow them to collect premiums and provide protection for treatment of injuries and illnesses that are unrelated to the pre-existing condition while excluding claims that are related.

HIPAA, the Health Insurance Privacy and Accountability Act, limits the pre-existing condition restrictions that a group health insurance arrangement can enforce. It gives group health plans the ability to exclude conditions for the first 12-months (in some cases 18-months) only if the insured had a significant break in creditable health insurance coverage (which excludes coverage like major medical) that lasted more than 62 days. This protection means that as long as you have continuous coverage, a group policy cannot exclude your pre-existing condition.

But HIPAA also protects the privacy of your medical records, something that’s become increasingly important in this digital age. The way that your sensitive health information is handled and disbursed is tightly regulated and penalties are explained within the act, giving many businesses the encouragement they needed to train staff in proper data handling and enforce compliance.

Between helping secure your coverage and protect your information, HIPAA is one of the most valuable legislative protections to affect the insurance industry in recent years.

Check with Strunk Insurance today to make sure your Oklahoma City Insurance has you covered.

The Importance of Cyber Liability Insurance

If you run an online business, then you have a responsibility to keep all your customers’ information private and protected. But even the best laid plans for the protection of private data can be impacted by aggressive cyber criminals who break down your security defenses and distribute customer name, address, credit card number and other data.


Because data is intangible, many business owners overlook it when developing plans to protect themselves from liabilities. But the damage that can be done when your client’s personal records are stolen is vast, and as the keeper of this data, it is your company that will be on the line for losses they experience as the result of a security breach.

Cyber liability insurance protects your business from the losses associated with hackers stealing client data, but its wide range of digital age protection doesn’t end there. It can also protect your business against:

• Copyright infringement claims
• Damages that result from a virus accidentally distributed by you or one of your employees
• Accusations of slander
• Various other problems introduced by digital business platforms.

Some policies even provide benefits that pay for public relations expenses while you recover the image of your company after accusations of slander or security breaches.

Preventing Cyber Liability Claims

Of course, cyber liability insurance policies don’t protect you against the events behind the claims—that is something you need to handle on your own. Some ways that you can reduce the likelihood of a claim are:

• Completely destroy hard drives with unused client data stored on them.
• Limit the amount of sensitive data you collect from clients to that which is vital to your business operations.
• Utilize plagiarism checking software before posting web content.
• Keep the virus protection software up-to-date on all company computers.
• Avoid making negative statements about clients or competitors in email or on company blogs.

The internet has opened up a whole new world of business opportunity, and a new world of business liabilities has quickly followed. Protect your business and employees by taking preventative measures to stop cyber liability claims before they happen. And because you can’t control every situation, invest in a cyber liability policy that covers your potential risks so that you can protect your business if one of these claims gets through.

Make sure your customers and your business are safe with Oklahoma City Insurance from Strunk Insurance today.

Oklahoma City Dentist Insurance: Rating Malpractice Insurance for Dentists

Malpractice insurance is a no-brainer for practicing dentists. Because while your intention may be to always provide the best, error-free service to your patients, sometimes accidents and misunderstandings happen, and you need to be protected against that possibility.

There are many different factors that go into pricing the malpractice side of Oklahoma City dentist insurance. One of the most crucial factors is to consider the type of dentistry being practiced by the proposed insured. For instance, if you practice general dentistry versus a specialty that may involve conducting surgery or administering anesthesia, then you can expect a lower premium because there is less risk of incident. 

Claims history is another obvious factor in malpractice insurance pricing. A dentist with prior malpractice claims presents a higher risk than a dentist with no claims or one with claims that were inexpensive to settle. 

Your exposure to risk, as determined by the frequency of your hours, also has a direct correlation on the amount that you could be charged for malpractice insurance. If you practice on a part-time basis, you will find that your quote is lower than it would be if you practiced on a full-time basis. 

Luckily, the determination of malpractice premium rates is not a one-sided activity. There are many ways to achieve discounts on your malpractice insurance quotes. If you waive your right to consent to claims settlement terms and if you agree to pay your premium in full annually, you could find enough savings to make a big impact on your premiums.

You may be tempted to buy a policy with a high deductible and low claim limit as a means of saving money, but remember, if you do this you may reduce your annual premium expense but you are also putting your practice and career at risk. Any claims that fall below your deductible or above your limits will be your responsibility to pay, which could crush your financial future for the sake of just a small premium savings. Instead, allow your malpractice insurance to do what it’s intended to do—protect you, your career, and your financial future from potential liabilities.

Make sure you have the best possible option for your Oklahoma City dentist insurance policy with Alexander & Strunk today!

Oklahoma City Home Insurance: Homeowners Insurance Post-Divorce

There are a lot of difficult decisions that must be made after a divorce. One often overlooked item that should be reevaluated is your home insurance policy. Because while you may be in the same home post-divorce that you were pre-divorce, there have probably been enough changes around the property that a home insurance overhaul is needed. 

Reduce deductibles: If you have been divorced from a wage earning spouse, then you will be adjusting to living on less income than you were before divorce. But even if you divorced a stay-at-home spouse, your expenses may be higher now that you need help filling the roles that you relied on your ex-spouse to fill. This means that you have some budget changes to make and it may also mean that the deductibles you have are no longer suitable. Finding a deductible that you can afford that also gives you a premium that works for your budget, is an important move. While high deductibles can reduce overall premiums, they leave a large liability on your shoulders that could pose a great financial risk if you can’t afford to pay them. 

Reduce contents limits: When your spouse moved out, he or she may have taken some of your joint property with them. The limits on the contents coverage for your home insurance policy likely includes the value of the items that they were awarded during the divorce, so reducing your limits to reflect the value of the items you kept is important. 

Liability limits: If your household income and savings was adversely affected by the divorce then you may want to consider raising the limits of the liability portion of your Oklahoma City home insurance policy or looking into an umbrella policy. With higher limits, you run less risk of having to pay out of pocket for liabilities because their expense exceeds your insurance benefits. 

Search for discounts: As you overhaul your coverage limits and deductibles, it’s a good time to take a look at discounts you may qualify for as well as those you don’t qualify for, but could by making some easy changes. Also, mention to your agent any risk reductions that have occurred since the divorce, such as the relocation of a dog whose breed made your home insurance more expensive. 

It’s important that you start looking out for yourself as soon as possible after a divorce. One of the ways you can do so is by working with your insurance agent to restructure all your insurance policies so that they fit your post-divorce budget, needs and risks, and not your pre-divorce life.

Make sure you have the best possible option for your Oklahoma City homeowners insurance policy with Alexander & Strunk today!