Functional Dysfunction

Every July, since the first year of our accidental business, most of my home owner's insurances happen to be due. Don't ask me why, but the majority of our gazillion homes we bought through the years were purchased in July. So here we are.

Also, because of strategic business decisions of years' past, we pay several of our insurances (and taxes, but that's December's issue) out of pocket. And, because we have a gazillion properties, traditional insurance companies stopped insuring us long ago. So five of our homes happen to be lumped into two commercial insurance policies.

This is where it gets a bit messy. Unfortunately three of the five homes in these two policies are homes Marty and I own without a partner. In the event you aren't completely confused and are still reading this: one policy holds three homes (two are Marty's and mine and one belongs to the LLC we have with Mr. Partner) and the other commercial policy holds two (one is Marty's and mine and one happens to be the home we have a short sale on--but it is in Mr. Partner's LLC).

Additionally, paying these two clunky policies is a bit of a chore. The money can't be co-mingled. So the Solo LLC can't pay Mr. Partner's LLC's policy without a lot of excessive journal entries and insanity Bliz just hasn't signed up for.

There are other insurance policies on our other homes out there, but these are the two policies tend to be most maddening. Once upon a time when Bliz had more free time, she would patiently sort through this, figure out which home's policy cost how much and then pay these particular bills for me. But one year she gave me some veiled threat of mutiny and a quadrupled hourly rate if she had to figure out how to disperse the money for these five homes.

So, this job is now mine. And now every July I have to dedicate several hours to figure out the login to the insurance Web site and guess at the password (because it is something unconventional like !obn0xious1) so I can actually read the policies and decipher the payment amount per home. It takes less time to read the entire Harry Potter series than figure this nonsense out.

I have to tell you, it would be genuinely nice if the insurance company would actually just mail me the policy and the bill like I have repeatedly requested. But, they don't. It is a fight I fought and lost. And at this point, I know what to do, where to look and just have adjusted my life accordingly.

Then there is Mrs. Sherwood's home's policy. This policy is from a different insurance company and they never send me a bill either. And again, I have asked and got tired of loosing this battle. There is only so much rejection I can handle in one month. But to their credit, they do send me a cancellation notice if I don't pay it. There have been numerous years I have had to call the insurance company begging to be reinstated (and suggesting if they had sent me a statement in the first place I would have taken care of this). Ironically, the only other time they send me a bill is after I send them $300 or so around July 12. Only then will they let me know exactly how much I really owe.

The biggest challenge with this process is, of course, that we are under-capitalized And, when one has under-capitalized issues, paying several thousand dollars of home owner's insurance is a bit of a challenge. So every summer we start a campaign to scrape together the money. Generally Marty and I make up the difference in July and Mr. Partner handles the money for the taxes in December. It is a simple dysfunction we have all grown comfortable with.

However, this year things were different. After I settled down last week do figure out what needed to happen, I discovered we had just enough money in the LLC to cover our insurances! You know, the way it should have been all along if things had gone smoothly. Sadly, the reason the money was there  this year to begin with was because we aren't paying for the two homes we are giving back.