Zurich Financial Services is a Swiss firm that does business principally in Europe and North America. Zurich North America is a leading property/casualty firm with a large base of corporate customers. Their prominence in the business world has led them to introduce a line of ‘political risk services’ to Western businesses venturing into markets with unstable, or potentially unstable political environments.

It’s an interesting example of an insurer finding a niche and filling it – and what is also interesting is the language with which they couch the services they provide. Zurich North America “offers investors, financial institutions, project developers and contractors risk protection that can help control losses associated with political risk or events in emerging markets. Zurich’s Risk insurance coverage can help reduce the risk arising from expropriation, political violence, currency inconvertibility and other perils. In addition, each political risk insurance policy is customized to fit the requirements of each transaction.”

One man’s war zone is another man’s emerging market. This insurance is crafted to support business ventures in countries with shaky government regimes – more often than not, one suspects, dictatorships of one sort or another. Generally, businesses do not face expropriation of property, sudden ‘currency inconvertibility’ or violence in nations that have a history of electoral politics. That is speculation, but a business that turns sour because of a shift in political winds is usually tied to the fortunes of the party or parties in power.

Zurich would have you know that their services are available in over 70 “emerging markets.” It would be intriguing to learn how insurance policies are “customized to fit the requirements of each transaction” in these volatile political environments. Zurich’s careful phrasing leads one to suspect that, to cannibalize an old Maoist saying, “Emerging markets grow out of the barrel of a gun.” Halliburton has certainly found that to be the case.

As a general rule, homeowners’ insurance isn’t going to cover damage to your personal property caused by power surges. Damage to roofs or exteriors caused by lightning should be covered, but the electrical surge coursing through your home’s power system probably isn’t included as a source of damage that is insured.

There is, however, special insurance available for power surges caused by lightning and by the restoration of power after an outage. Florida Power and Light, a regional company serving about two thirds of the state, has teamed up with American Bankers Insurance – also a Florida based firm – to provide Power Surge protection insurance.

FPL Energy Services has had years of experience dealing with lightning strikes and power surges and knows the damage they cause. While there’s no way to completely prevent the damage, Power Surge Protection can provide post-surge recovery for your essential electronics and appliances.

Facts on lightning provided by FPL:

* Lightning is the most dangerous and most frequent weather hazard experienced.

* Damage from lightning to home electronics usually occurs from an indirect strike to utility poles or wires nearby entering the building through power, phone and TV lines.

* Lightning causes billions of dollars in property damage every year.

* The state of Florida, the lightning capital, experienced over 300,000 lightning strikes in 2002 alone.

Their Power Surge Protection policy covers the cost to repair or replace your appliances and electronic equipment caused by damage from power surges and lightning strikes. There is no deductible. Coverage ranges from $2,000 to $10,000 and monthly premiums from five to twenty five dollars a month.

If you live in an area where you find yourself scurrying around pulling the plug on various computers and TVs more times a year than you’d like, there is insurance out there – at least in Florida – to protect your equipment if you aren’t there to scurry.

The necessity of insurance – home, health, auto – is about as certain as death and taxes. So insurance companies play an important and non-negotiable role in our lives. Except when they choose not to. Sometimes they decide to get out of insurance arenas that don’t meet their standards of risk assessment; when they do, the federal government picks up the slack – as they have with flood insurance, crop insurance and lately, terrorism insurance.

And sometimes they simply decide to walk. That’s what Allstate is doing with property insurance in the Southeast. Florida no longer stands nearly alone in losing insurance coverage because of the risk of hurricanes. Allstate Insurance has added coastal regions of North and South Carolina, Alabama, Maryland and Virginia to the growing list of areas nationwide where it is cutting back homeowners insurance coverage.

Allstate, the nation’s second-largest home and auto insurer behind State Farm, confirmed Thursday that it is dropping coverage for about 12,000 homeowners in eight counties of South Carolina, 4,000 in 14 counties of North Carolina and an unspecified number in Alabama. Allstate will no longer write new homeowners’ policies starting in 2007 in 11 coastal counties of Maryland and 19 in Virginia, although existing policies will be renewed.

Collectively, the changes leave Allstate with sharply reduced coverage for almost the entire eastern seaboard. The insurer announced several weeks ago that it will no longer offer new property insurance policies, including homeowners’ in Connecticut, Delaware and New Jersey beginning next year. It said earlier that it was dropping coverage to 120,000 customers in Florida and eight downstate New York counties, along with 26,000 Texas policyholders for wind damage, and also limited homeowners’ coverage in coastal areas of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.

Chairman and Chief Executive Edward Liddy has said the company is forced to cut its exposure to disaster-related losses. While shifting its emphasis to other areas, such as financial services, Allstate has been seeking the creation of a government fund to help cover homeowners’ losses in major disasters.

Allstate is engaged in skimming the property insurance portfolio they want, and looking for government coverage for the rest. That’s the history of the industry and calls for a new definition of risk analysis as it applies to the industry profiteers that will, for instance, insure your car but not your house.

Risk management at the municipal level includes analyzing the costs associated with severe weather. Because there is insurance available for just about everything in this world, cities can buy policies that provide coverage for public works department cost overruns due to weather. This time of the year, one of the most important policy clauses is insurance for snow removal coverage whenever the municipality overspends its budget for removing snow or under-anticipates the total amount of snowfall during a certain winter period.

Last year, the Midwestern and Northeastern states were beset with an overabundance of snowfall which closed airports and clogged up municipal streets and state thoroughfares. While mild winters seem to be an ongoing byproduct of global warming, severe storms can test a town’s budget nonetheless. A policy for excessive snowfall varies in cost, depending on the community’s budget for snow removal and location of the community.

Snowfall coverage is applied in this fashion. The insured municipality selects a dollar limit of coverage per storm. The total available under the entire policy is 10 times the limit per storm. Next the insurer determines the average snowfall per storm for the community. The insurance coverage is tripped every time the amount of snowfall in any one storm (a 24-hour period) exceeds the amount declared in the policy.

As an example, a community that has an average snowfall of four inches per storm chooses a $15,000 limit each time it snows five inches or more. If there are five such storms during the policy period, the municipality can receive as much as $75,000, less any deductible. If you’re the Buffalo city manager, a policy like this is going to be a priority. In places like Missouri, which was hammered in December with snow and ice, the risk is questionable. What is not questionable is the cost of overtime and the maintenance of heavy duty vehicles involved in keeping the streets open during a rough stretch of winter.

A Minneapolis dog rescue group has brought to light yet another reason that some of us are considered property/casualty insurance risks – your insurance policy that also covers your personal liability. The Minneapolis group is headed by Beth DeLaForest, who says that placement of certain dogs has become difficult because some insurance companies won’t insure households where such dogs reside.

Of the 30 applications her program receives every month, about five drop out because of insurance problems. Ever since a fatal mauling in San Francisco five years ago, insurance companies been increasingly denying or restricting coverage to homeowners with certain breeds of dogs. The dogs most likely to draw negative attention are: Rottweilers, pit bulls, Doberman pinschers and German shepherds. Insurers can pay steep prices settling dog bite claims and view these dogs as aggressive and more likely to attack and injure someone.

Aggressive dogs “have been expensive for the industry,” said Carolyn Gorman, a Washington-based vice president of the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group. Insurers “should have the latitude to determine what kind of risks they are willing to insure.”

St. Paul Travelers Companies Inc. does not write new policies for homeowners with certain dogs, although when asked, the company declined to disclose specific breeds. Allstate Corp.’s underwriting policies vary state to state (just as with hurricanes); Hartford will not insure people with Rottweilers, pit bulls or Presa Canarios.

Liberty Mutual reviews homeowner policies on a case-by-case basis. If a homeowner has a certain dog, such as an Akita, German shepherd or pit bull, the company wants to know the dog’s training, vaccination history and temperament before deciding on coverage.

An unusual mix of last century’s British Empire and this century’s practice of terrorism-as-politics has arisen in a lawsuit filed against an event liability insurance company. Sri Lanka’s cricket governing body is suing a private insurance company in a bid to recover nearly 12 million dollars lost when an important match to be played in the country was abruptly cancelled.

The triangular one-day series involving the hosts, South Africa and India between August 14 and 29 was scrapped after one team raised security concerns on the conflict-torn island. Actually one team – the South Africans – fled the country after a mine blew up the Pakistani Ambassador’s car and killed four of his guards. The blast was blamed on the Tamil rebels. The blast went off close to the South African team hotel and damaged 10 vehicles.

Sri Lanka Cricket had obtained a Sports Cancellation and Abandonment Policy from the local Ceylinco Insurance Company. “We have filed action as the company refused to pay the claim giving various excuses,” a Sri Lanka Cricket official said.

“The claim remains unsettled despite our action to cover terrorism in the insurance policy.” The complaint seeks to recover losses of 11.9 million dollars due to the cancellation of the tournament.

Umbrella insurance was, at one time, a policy designed for people of substantial means, with substantial assets to lose in a liability suit. In today’s litigious world, umbrella coverage makes sense for many of us who are simply salaried homeowners or people with some assets and active lifestyles.

Umbrella policies supplement the liability coverage you already have through your home and auto insurance and provide an extra layer of protection. Umbrella policies are no longer just for the wealthy – they’re for anyone who has assets that might be at risk if they are responsible for a serious accident.

If you don’t have enough liability coverage to resolve a claim or a lawsuit, the person bringing the action might go after your home or your other assets to pay for damage. Umbrella policies cover damage claims that you or your dependents may cause.

Umbrella policies take effect after the liability insurance in your homeowners and/or auto policy runs out. For example, if you have a home insurance policy with liability coverage of $300,000, the umbrella policy will pay claims above that amount up to the limit you have chosen for your umbrella policy.

Most of the risk is assumed under the primary auto or home policy, which is why personal liability umbrella is so inexpensive. You can buy a $1 million or larger umbrella policy for less than $200 a year.

Many companies insist that you carry both your auto and homeowners’ coverage with them before they will sell you an umbrella policy. In addition, your insurer may stipulate that your auto or homeowners liability limits be at some minimum amount. Umbrella policies are usually sold with a deductible that might run anywhere from $250 to $1,000. If you’re on the hook for a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, that’s a small price to pay. Even then, umbrella policies have limits. Many of them will not pay punitive damages, should you lose your case.

Prices have fallen slightly for return of premium life insurance products in the last two years. Return of

premium products are the type of life insurance that offer you all your premiums back at the end of the policy

if you don’t die. Some products have been introduced that have enhanced cash surrender values (higher than

the surrender values in the early ROP offerings). In addition, some products allow access to the cash

surrender values via policy loans. Others don’t. This is also a relatively new feature.

Interest generally in ROP is growing, as consumers like the concept of getting their money back if they don’t

die during the level term period. Business owners are human beings, and as such, they, like everyone else,

don’t like spending money on something they believe will likely yield them nothing (i.e. a term policy if you

don’t die during the term). ROP gives them an alternative. And many like it and use it in many different ways

including buy-sell agreements and key man insurance.

Not necessarily. College graduates without a job with health insurance benefits and no extra cash to spend on monthly premiums may feel that they have no alternative but to use prayer and multi-vitamins as their only form of insurance.

COBRA is a federal law that handles the question of young adults and health insurance. It stipulates that young adults can still be covered on their parents’ policies even after they are no longer a dependent. It varies from policy to policy, but usually a dependent is defined is a child over the age of 19 or a college student under the age of 22.

COBRA does not state, however, that that coverage will be offered under the same payment plan as it did when the young adult was still classified as a dependent. A premium and a deductible will apply and the employer who provides the insurance won’t pay the full premium.

Depending on the policy, this may be just as expensive as taking out a personal health insurance policy, but it can be beneficial if its only temporary. Alternatively, a short-term health plan is an option, but it’s only a good idea if permanent coverage will definitely be available when the policy expires as they are non-renewable.

They may not be low-cost or free, but there are health insurance options available to those who are just starting out in the world.

Return of premium life insurance policies are the kind of term life policy that provides all of your money back at the end of the term if you don’t die. We’re seeing more and more consumers buying this type of policy.