Pickup Insurance Quotes

Special Agent Brad Wolgast hated Texas. He hated everything about it. [...] He hated the billboards and the freeways and the faceless subdivisions and the Texas flag, which flew over everything, always as big as a circus tent; he hated the giant pickup trucks everybody drove, no matter that gas was thirteen bucks a gallon and the world was slowly seaming itself to death like a package of peas in a microwave. He hated the boots and the belts and the way people talked, ya'll this and ya'll that, as if they spent the day ropin' and ridin', not cleaning teeth and selling insurance and doing the books, like people did everywhere.

What was shocking were the rewards my father's cousins had gathered in the intervening couple of decades. They farmed now on thousands of acres, not hundreds. They drove fancy pickup trucks, owned lakefront property and second homes. A simple Internet search offered the truth of where their riches had come from: good ol' Uncle Sam. Recently I clicked again on a database of farm subsidy payments, and found that five of my father's first cousins had been paid, all told, $3 million between 1995 and 2005 - and that on top of whatever they'd earned outright for the sale of their corn and soybeans. They worked hard, certainly. They'd saved and scrimped through the lean years. They were good and honorable yeoman, and now they'd come through to their great reward: a prime place at the trough of the welfare state. All that corn syrup guzzled down the gullets of America's overweight children, all that beef inefficiently fattened on cheap feed, all that ethanol being distilled in heartland refineries: all of it underwritten by as wasteful a government program as now exists this side of the defense industry. In the last ten years, the federal government has paid $131 million in subsidies and disaster insurance in just the county [in Minnesota] where I grew up. Corn is subsidized to keep it cheap, and the subsidies encourage overproduction, which encourages a scramble for ever more ways to use corn, and thus bigger subsidies - the perfect feedback loop of government welfare.

Kim was twenty-three, single, on her own, and at a job making $27,000 per year. She had recently started her Total Money Makeover. She was behind on credit cards, not on a budget, and barely making her rent because her spending was out of control. She let her car insurance drop because she “couldn’t afford it.” She did her first budget and two days later was in a car wreck. Since it wasn’t bad, the damage to the other guy’s car was only about $550. As Kim looked at me through panicked tears, that $550 might as well have been $55,000. She hadn’t even started Baby Step One. She was trying to get current, and now she had one more hurdle to clear before she even started. This was a huge emergency. Seven years ago George and Sally were in the same place. They were broke with new babies, and George’s career was sputtering. George and Sally fought and scraped through a Total Money Makeover. Today they are debt-free, even their $85,000 home. They have a $12,000 emergency fund, retirement in Roth IRAs, and even the kids’ college is funded. George has grown personally, his career has blossomed, and he now makes $75,000 per year while Sally stays home with the kids. One day a piece of trash flew out of the back of George’s pickup and hit a car behind him on the interstate. The damage was about $550. I think you can see that George and Sally probably adjusted one month’s budget and paid the repairs, while Kim dealt with her wreck for months. The point is that as you get in better shape, it takes a lot more to rock your world. When the accidents occurred, George’s heart rate didn’t even change, but Kim needed a Valium sandwich to calm down. Those true stories illustrate the fact that as you progress through your Total Money Makeover, the definition of an emergency that is worthy to be covered by the emergency fund changes. As you have better health insurance, disability insurance, more room in your budget, and better cars, you will have fewer things that qualify as emergency-fund emergencies. What used to be a huge, life-altering event will become a mere inconvenience.

Of more angst to drivers are the customer ratings systems imposed by the app companies. While most drivers do not have a problem with the notion of being rated, they are concerned that they will receive poor marks for circumstances beyond their control. Customers can give even the most earnest drivers bad ratings for any reason such as bumpy rides over pothole strewn roads, traffic congestion and passengers underestimating how much time they need to reach their destinations. Miscommunication between passengers and drivers can occur because passengers cannot speak the local language, are drunk, or fall asleep and cannot direct the driver to their remote destinations. Perhaps some passengers just do not like the ethnic group to which some drivers appear to belong. Circumstances such as these are clearly the fault of passengers who may rate drivers poorly nonetheless. Drivers with low ratings can be expelled from on-demand taxi services. This unfairness is compounded to the extent that drivers make large investments in their cars, insurance and fuel. Making drivers, who basically invested in a franchise, vulnerable to expulsion from a system because of unfair ratings seems to me to be a potential source of dissention or even litigation. Another concern associated with the taxi app business model is that drivers only have 15 seconds to respond to notices of pick up opportunities. Drivers that fail to respond in such tight windows lose the business. Repeat failures to make timely responses can result in temporary suspensions. This pressure, and related distractions associated with interacting with handsets, is applied simultaneously with all of the challenges of navigating traffic in a variety of weather conditions. Foremost, this is a driving hazard that imperils everyone in the vicinity. It also ties in with the ratings systems because drivers are only rated on the rides they complete. Drivers who claim rides but abandon the customer if it looks like the pickup will be delayed have no ratings risk. Paradoxically, no ratings result in the worst customer service as passengers end up stranded.

If you are a midwife, a yoga instructor, a bookseller, a gardener, or an architect, you are likely to be a Democrat. Conversely, beer wholesalers, car salespeople, home builders, exterminators, and insurance agents are disproportionately Republicans.

Unlike the house you live in, practically every expense attached to your rental property counts as a deductible business expense for tax purposes. Expenses to deduct include: • Mortgage interest • Property taxes • Insurance • Homeowners association dues • Advertising (to fill a vacancy) • Utilities • Repairs and maintenance • Pest control • Landscaping • Trash pickup • Depreciation What doesn’t count as an expense? Any major repairs or renovations you perform count as capital expenditures that get added to the cost basis of the property, effectively reducing your taxable income when you eventually sell.

Buy no car. If you’re a city-dweller (or live on campus), check to see whether zipcar.com could work for you. You pay $9 a month to “borrow” cars—and pickup trucks—for an hourly rate, starting at $12.50, that includes gas and insurance. Compared with the fortune you could easily spend on parking, insurance, maintenance, and—of course—car payments, even liberal use of Zipcar could save big bucks.

Know who will be assuming the risk in advance. Talk to your insurance agent first and get informed as to exactly what will be covered when you rent vans. You have made an investment in your agent as your expert. Follow the advice given and do not deviate. While the decision to accept or decline the extra coverage products will ultimately be yours, you should arm yourself so that the rental firm cannot just sell you everything in their arsenal without you realizing it. Call the rental office in advance and get an explanation of the coverage products. Decide before pickup!

Special Agent Brad Wolgast hated Texas. He hated everything about it. He hated the weather, which was hot as an oven one minute and freezing the next, the air so damp it felt like a wet towel over your head. He hated the look of the place, beginning with the trees, which were scrawny and pathetic, their limbs all gnarled up like something out of Dr. Seuss, and the flat, windblown nothingness of it. He hated the billboards and the freeways and faceless subdivisions and the Texas flag, which flew over everything, always big as a circus tent; he hated the giant pickup trucks everybody drove, no matter that gas was thirteen bucks a gallon and the world was slowly steaming itself to death like a package of peas in a microwave. He hated the boots and the belt buckles and the way people talked, y’all this and y’all that, as if they spent the day ropin’ and ridin’, not cleaning teeth and selling insurance and doing the books, like people did everywhere.