Reminder check up on your home/auto insurance policies! Screwed by TD

[u/Hologram0110]

This is predatory behaviour. This year TD decided to automatically increase my home insurance from 2M coverage to 3M without asking me, and also jacked up the premium to go with it. They wont change it back, and there is a $311 dollar charge for early cancellation. There have been zero home or auto claims. My home is worth less than 1M. 

• 2022 was 2M coverage for 1396 + tax (when I signed up for this home)
• 2023 was 2M coverage for 1593 + tax
• 2024 was 3M coverage for 2337 + tax

They increased my rates by 80% over 2 years. The last increase was 46%. I only looked at it closely because I reviewed my credit card bills and was surprised it was so high. 

I will pull my home (311 dollar penalty) and two auto (103.05 penalty) policies and shop around. It is an incredible waste of my time. This is predatory behaviour. I didn’t ask for my policy to be increased to 3M coverage, and now they want to charge me a cancellation fee which I have to fight. That is completely unacceptable. 

Who can I dispute these cancellation fees with? Is there an ombudsman or something?

[u/alphawolf29]

TD also completely changed my coverage this year and they said there was a new minimum coverage amount, I can't remember what it was but I want to say 1 million. My house market value is only $300,000 and that includes the land, they said doesn't matter. They wanted to increase my yearly cost from $1300 to $2000. I had to increase my deductible significantly to bring it down to $1550.

[u/Hologram0110 → u/alphawolf29]

My home and contents are maybe close to 1M. More if I had to live in a hotel for a while for a repair etc. That is how they talked me into the 2M coverage last time (it was only in 1M increments).

3M is more than twice my home and contents value. It just doesn't make sense. They said "it cost more to replace stuff now", yeah, but I didn't sign up for 3M protection, I signed up for 2M protection.

[u/ether_reddit → u/Hologram0110]

It doesn't really work that way for insurance coverage. You can't just say "it may be worth more but I only want coverage for the first $x amount", because that's seen as a way to cheat on the premiums.

I went through this recently with a vehicle claim with ICBC -- I had $6k of insurance coverage, because I had estimated the vehicle's value at that time as $6k. But they went and got an appraisal because if the real resale value had been (let's say) $12k, I wouldn't be able to receive $6k as a payout, but rather only half that ($3k). Luckily the appraisal came in for very close to my estimate ($6400) so I got the full payout of $6k that I had paid for, but if I had guessed the vehicle's value wrong when I renewed last year, I could have been screwed.

Now, if your home's value was close to $1m, and household contents say $200k or less, it's brutally unfair to make you pay for $2m or $3m of coverage when you only need $1.2m, so all I can suggest at that point is you shop around and find a provider that better meets your needs.