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By Kimberly Lilley, CIRMS, CMCA

This article first appeared in The Communicator Magazine, Spring 2025.

Most of us have been impacted by the insurance crisis in California, and if we haven’t been impacted yet, we will be. California has billions of dollars of property that needs insurance, and as losses piled up between 2017 and 2022, carriers in CA tightened their underwriting criteria, limited the amount of property they would insure, or left the state entirely in order to stay solvent. This constriction in the insurance marketplace left many without affordable or adequate insurance, and too often, no insurance options at all.

In this vacuum, carriers are being creative in finding ways to write insurance in CA, while reducing their risk enough for it to be reasonable for them to do so. One way of managing risk is to spread it out over multiple carriers, so each only takes a small part of the risk, ensuring that none of them hold the lion’s share of the losses if one should occur.

By: Amy Davis

On a Thursday morning, I received the call that no daughter ever wants to receive. It was from my mom and her car was surrounded by fire. At the same time that I was taking my mom’s call, my dad and stepmom were sending me videos of several fires on the opposite side of town from where my mom was located. This was Paradise, California, November 8th, 2018.

November 11, 2018, I flew to Chico to be with family and friends and to help them with their insurance claims. Almost immediately, the question arose, “Can we just cut our losses and move?” The answer was an easy “yes.” Fortunately for survivors of the Camp Fire and future wildfire victims, California has passed several laws aimed at protecting persons whose interests are covered under insurance policies following a declared disaster.

Insureds whose homes are a total loss can now use a greater amount of their policies’ coverages to purchase an existing home or rebuild elsewhere. Prior to 2018, our California insurance...