You may wonder what this title has to do with your health. This message is really about your financial health and your taxes, which I think are important health-related issues. Financial stress obviously can affect our mental and physical health.
A diligent, caring, gifted new insurance agent in Liberal, Denese Yancey, managed to convince our City Commission last December, that it was time the city put out its insurance policy for bids, rather than leave the policy with the same agent year after year. As a side note, two City Commissioners opposed this idea from the beginning and they fortunately ended up on the bottom of the recent Primary vote.
After an outside consultant prepared the specifications for the city insurance, Denese and the incumbent agent submitted bids. Tonight the incumbent agent did win again, but he had to reduce his bid by over $100,000 from last year. He had been raising the premium by over $200,000 in each of the past two years. He was only 3% lower overall than Denese's first attempt at bidding for the City insurance business.
The City Commission did cost us an additional $100,000 however by leaving all the insurance business with the incumbent. If they had split the insurance into the general liability portion and the workers compensation portion, then Denese would have saved them another $100,000 on the general portion and the incumbent could have had the workers' compensation policy as his bid was below Denese's only on this portion. The current Commissioners missed this completely. Hopefully the incoming Commissioners will insist on yearly bids as the old Council stated tonight that it only needed to be re-bid every 3 years.
Moral of the story - get multiple bids on all your financial needs every year and don't assume that the usual agent you have always dealt with will give you the best price year after year. My hat is off to Denese for saving me (and everyone else in Liberal) taxes this year.
drBob
You may wonder what this title has to do with your health. This message is really about your financial health and your taxes, which I think are important health-related issues. Financial stress obviously can affect our mental and physical health.
A diligent, caring, gifted new insurance agent in Liberal, Denese Yancey, managed to convince our City Commission last December, that it was time the city put out its insurance policy for bids, rather than leave the policy with the same agent year after year. As a side note, two City Commissioners opposed this idea from the beginning and they fortunately ended up on the bottom of the recent Primary vote.
After an outside consultant prepared the specifications for the city insurance, Denese and the incumbent agent submitted bids. Tonight the incumbent agent did win again, but he had to reduce his bid by over $100,000 from last year. He had been raising the premium by over $200,000 in each of the past two years. He was only 3% lower overall than Denese's first attempt at bidding for the City insurance business.
The City Commission did cost us an additional $100,000 however by leaving all the insurance business with the incumbent. If they had split the insurance into the general liability portion and the workers compensation portion, then Denese would have saved them another $100,000 on the general portion and the incumbent could have had the workers' compensation policy as his bid was below Denese's only on this portion. The current Commissioners missed this completely. Hopefully the incoming Commissioners will insist on yearly bids as the old Council stated tonight that it only needed to be re-bid every 3 years.
Moral of the story - get multiple bids on all your financial needs every year and don't assume that the usual agent you have always dealt with will give you the best price year after year. My hat is off to Denese for saving me (and everyone else in Liberal) taxes this year.
drBob