Done with Allstate, finally.

This is a little late in the writing, but we are finally done with Allstate. The whole thing was pretty much as I assumed it was. Their system kicked it out to collections automatically after the account was reinstated to fix the lapse due to the account being marked as behind a few months ago when it was originally canceled. They pulled it out of collections and we paid Allstate directly for our final balance. I've checked my credit and have seen nothing reported from Allstate.

At this point, I believe I am actually completely and totally done with this whole Allstate mess.

Why Allstate, why? Leave me alone!

I thought that we were finally completely done with the crap this is Allstate. The nightmare continues...

Ever since we got the letter from Allstate saying that our policy was reinstated, we've been watching for a bill from them for that policy. It was supposed to be $169.25 or thereabouts. We have yet to receive a bill or account statement saying what we owe.

Tonight, we got a phone call from a collection agency to collect on our past due account of the $169 and change. It has been under a month since they reinstated the policy and it has already made it's way to a collection agency without ever bothering to send me a bill.

I have emailed the CS rep I've been dealing with at Allstate asking to have this fixed. I assume it will be at least Monday before I here back. This crap had better not touch my credit.

Finally done with Allstate

We are finally done with Allstate. It's been a complete nightmare.

At the end of July, I was finally called by an Allstate support representative in response to my complaint to the Utah Insurance Department. They had decided that they could reinstate my policy and generously allowed us to have it at the same rate we had previously, $740.24/6 months.

August 5, 2011
"...before I can begin I will need asigned request indicating the would like the policy reinstated, the date that coverageneeds to be extended to/the new terminated date, and that you are responsible forany back-owed premium.


Additionally, per our conversation on July 26, 2011, we will not know the exact amount due for extending the coverageuntil everything has finished processing.  However, we are honoring your policypremium of $740.24.  Depending on the number of days coverage is extended,the premium due will be approximately $200.00."


I don't like the word approximately in there. At this point, I don't have an ounce of trust in Allstate. How can it be so hard to come up with the real number? I did some math...

Our policy, per day, would be:

$740.24 for a six month policy
$740.24 * 2 = $1480.48 for a cost of a year of coverage at this rate
$1480.48 / 365 = $4.056 per day of coverage for the policy
$4.056 * 42 = $170.352 for 42 days of lapsed coverage.

By my calculations, the coverage should cost around $170.35. Their $200 estimate seemed quite high, so when I signed my document telling them to reinstate my coverage, I put a ceiling of $172 in there for how much they could charge me. That allowed some leeway to make things easier.

My letter was rejected.
August 11, 2011
"I am in receipt of your email as well asthe signed request.  Per our discussions that took place on July 26, 2011,I am unable to provide you with the exact amount that will be due until theendorsements have been processed.  Once your request to extend thecoverage has been completed, I will be able to advise you of the exact amount due.  As such, I am unable to accept the signed request included in yourmost recent communication."


I responded with my calculations and said that I was not willing to sign a paper without the ceiling in it or without the actual amount of the coverage. At this point, I also emailed the Utah Insurance Department with my concern of Allstate refusing to give me an actual price.

August 17, 2011
"Thank you for your email.  Previously,we provided you with a rough estimate for the additional coverage that you are requesting. At your request, I have contacted our accounting department and have beenprovided with an estimate of approximately $169.52 to extend coverage from May 26,2011 to July 7, 2011.  Again, this is just an estimate.  The actual cost of this coverage may be slightly more or less.  There are no fees toreinstate your policy, you will only be charged for the additional number ofdays of coverage provided.  Once we receive a signed request as previouslydiscussed and the changes have been completed, we will provide you with the exactamount due."


This number seems to be pretty close to what I had calculated previously, but they still will give the real amount until after the fact. I asked again to verify that they were refusing to give me the actual amount until after I had been charged.

August 18, 2011
"As we have discussed, I am only able to provide you with the estimated premium amount until the endorsements have beenprocessed.  Though the amount was estimated by accounting, it should veryclose to the actual dollar amount that will be due.  The offer to extendcoverage has been made as an accommodation, and unfortunately, I am unable todo anything further until I receive your signed request."


At this point, I realized that the letter I had signed previously fit nicely under the amount they were now saying is the new estimate and I reminded the agent of that.

After that, I didn't hear anything for several days.

On August 25th I got a letter in the mail saying my policy was reinstated. After sending an email to the support agent, policy documents were on the way showing I no longer had a lapse in coverage. I got that document last week and am now getting things cleared up with my new carrier, Progressive. I got a new policy for my homeowner's policy through progressive as well and have now terminated everything I had with Allstate. It feels good to be done with Allstate.

Allstate says, "We have to step out"

Allstate's resolution department hammered the final nail in the coffin a few days ago saying that there was nothing they were willing to do to fix it. We had already filed the complaint with the Utah Insurance Department at this point, as working with Allstate had gotten us nowhere. After final word from Allstate, I wrote up this blog and started posting it to different places on the internet, including twitter, which got the response I posted yesterday.

Yesterday afternoon, we get an email from Allstate.

We are aware of your complaint on Twitter. Please be advised that your complaint is now being handled by the state Insurance Department of Utah. They will contact you, once there investigation is complete.

Executive Assistant

Chairman's Customer Care Team

Allstate Insurance Company

They won't even bother to try at this point. The person working on our case with the insurance department asked that if we could manage to resolve this on our own, we could inform them and they would drop the case. We relayed that to Allstate, but they aren't interested.

 Once the state Insurance Department gets involved, Allstate has to step out

If they would have just fixed the issue, I would be willing to just move on. I still hope that the lapse in coverage caused by all this is resolved, but I sincerely hope that our agent and Allstate have some sort of consequence for how this has been handled.

The cost of doing business with Allstate

I just got a response back from Progressive regarding how much extra I'm paying because of this mess:

"I have reviewed your policy and if there were no lapse in coverage your premium would decrease by $108.00. Your total six-month premium would be $748.00."

Thank you Brett Turley with Alltate! You are costing me $18/month for who knows how long. You should already have my address, you can go ahead and start sending me checks every month. Actually, go ahead and make it $50 month, since I should be paying just $96/month with State Farm right now.

Twitter gets a response

I made a twitter post yesterday afternoon after writing this blog:

@Allstate agent lied to me for months. Allstate refuses to fix problem. Stuck with lapse in coverage. #notingoodhandsgoo.gl/4HXVV
http://twitter.com/#!/nmvh5/status/93415785808138240

15 minutes later...

@nmvh5 sorry to hear about your concern. Please DM me your first/last name & state/zip. I will have our Chairman's Team team reach out. ^cf
http://twitter.com/#!/Allstate/status/93418971537219584

I really doubt anything comes of it, but it's at least a new group of people looking into it.

I submitted this story to consumerist.com and will be posting the story to other complaint websites and the BBB if a solution isn't found soon. I also submitted this to to KUTV news stations 'Get Gephardt" in an effort to have more people get involved.

Allstate's Stance: Lie, deceive... profit.

In late 2010, my wife and I began shopping around for new auto and home insurance policies. After entering in our information on an insurance shopping website, we began to be contacted by several insurance agencies. One of these agents was Brett Turley, with Allstate. He put together a quote for auto and home policies which were similarly priced to what we already had. We were interested in the policy, but didn't make the change yet. Over the next several months, we received frequent phone calls from Brett asking if we were ready to switch to Allstate. In March of 2011, we finally decided to make the change.


Everything went fine initially. We had some issues getting our previous carrier to send over information on our policy with them, but nothing significant. In April, we received a letter from our bank who financed our vehicles saying that they didn't have an active policy for our cars on file and needed a policy sent to them that covered our cars. We contacted our agent to get that information to the bank. He said he would get it taken care of.


In early May, the trouble begins. We received a letter from Allstate, dated May 6, saying that our insurance had been terminated and we had a balance due of $42.68. The letter doesn't say anything about why the policy was terminated and we didn't have any idea what the problem was so we called our agent. We told him about the letter and asked what was going on. He says he'll look into it and get back with us. After a few days and no call from Brett, we call him back. He said that they needed policy information from our previous carrier. He also said to not worry about the terminated policy letter and that we were covered for at least the next 30 days. He said he would contact our carrier and get the policy information from them and get it all sorted out.


Later in May, we receive another letter from Allstate. This one, dated may 21, says the same thing as the previous letter. We call our agent again to find out what the problem was. He says he'll look into it and get back with us. He calls back saying that the account is underwriting and is fine. He assures us that we are covered and to not worry about it. 


June comes around along with another letter from Allstate. "This is our third and final notice regarding your outstanding balance." Again, we contact our agent and get a call back saying the same basic thing as before. Everything is in underwriting, dont' worry about it, you're fine. We don't pay the outstanding balance as our policies were set up to automatically withdraw from our checking account.


Soon after, we get a letter from our bank, dated June 7, saying that they haven't received any evidence of current insurance coverage for our vehicles. We contact our agent, yet again, and tell him about the letter. He says he'll get in contact with our bank and get them the policy information they needed. 


A couple of weeks later, another letter from our bank arrives. This one dated June 21. "Thank you for taking the time to respond to this request. We recently received a policy covering the collateral listed below. We were not named as lienholder/loss payee on this policy." Okay, they got a policy but our agent didn't get them listed as the lienholder. We figured that would be a pretty easy thing to deal with and at least this shows that we have insurance for sure. We tell our agent about the letter and he says he'll take care of it.


At this point, we thought everything was taken care of finally. It's been a rocky transition, but at least we're with a big named carrier and have our own pet agent to deal with problems. Everything  should be fine. 


Well crap...


A few days later, at the end of June, we get a phone call. It's a recording from a collection agency saying they're collecting on a debt we owe. The recording gives a website and account numbers to look it up online. Guess who it is? Allstate! That $42.68 balance that they said we owed that should have been dealt with by now. 


July is not a good month.


Friday, July 1st, we begin calling our agent. Several phone calls with the same result: endless ringing. No answer, no answering machine, nothing. We assume it was because of the upcoming holiday. We tried calling a few more times over the weekend, just to see, but had the same result. Monday comes around. It's the 4th and we assume there's no one in the office because of the holiday. We were right. Tuesday! They've got to be in the office by now. No such luck. No answer, no answering machine, just endless ringing. We give up on our agent and call Allstate directly at 1-800-Allstate. We speak to Karen and tell her about what's going on. She seems understanding of the situation and very concerned with our agent's behavior. She looks at our account and says that the problem is they needed policy information for the previous 2 years of coverage before we were with Allstate and after we got that to them, everything would be fine and there wouldn't be any lapse in coverage. We had only with our prior carrier for 1 year and 9 months and their request made sense overall. No big deal, we can finally be done with this crap. We call the older carrier and get policy information from them and get it to Allstate. We made sure to file a complaint with Allstate about our agent.


After faxing the policy information to Allstate, we follow up with a call to confirm they received the documents. Adrienne, with Allstate, said the documents were received and she would finalize the report to send off for reinstatement.


By now, the frustration with Allstate was more than we wanted to deal with. We contacted an agent with State Farm who worked with my brother. He initially quoted us policy for $30/month less than Allstate was, but when he was running checks in their system, they came up that our Allstate policy was canceled on May 26th. This was the first we heard of this. Now, we can't get the policy with State Farm because we had a lapse in coverage greater than 30 days. 


Now we are getting more and more fed up with everything. No one we talked to with Allstate the last few days said anything about the policy being canceled back in May. Our agent had assured us that we were covered and even sent our bank policy information in June, which turned out to be after the policy had already expired. We call up Adrienne with Allstate again and ask about the cancellation date. She confirms the May 26th termination and also informs us that they wouldn't be reinstating the policy because the policy our agent wrote for us required us to be with the same previous carrier for at least 3 years. At no point in the entire process of getting quotes or signing up for the policy were we told about this requirement. We never said we were with our prior carrier that long, nor did our agent mention that requirement. Adrienne says that we can file a petition of reinstatement, but it wouldn't be handled until at least Monday, July 11th and we would still be uninsured until then. At this point, we become quite nervous. It turns out we hadn't had coverage for over a month and we still wouldn't for at least several more days. Not wanting to risk anything, we sign up with Progressive for a policy to make sure we are covered. We end up having to pay an extra $20/month more than Allstate, and $50/month more than State Farm would have been.


The agent that we had worked with, Brett, was located in Logan, UT. Logan is in the very northern part of Utah. We are located in the very southern part of Utah. We happen to have a friend up in Logan and had her go by our agents office to see if anyone was there. We had still been calling his office number and had yet to get anything other than endless ringing. She gets to the office and the door has their hours listed as Monday - Saturday, 8am to 5pm. No one is there. There are desks inside with papers and computer monitors visible. She was at the office on Thursday, July 7th at 1pm and again at 3pm. That should have been normal business hours. She took a few pictures and left. 


That afternoon, we contacted the Utah insurance department who was quite concerned with what had transpired with our agent and Allstate. They had us fill out and submit to them a complaint which they have received along with copies of letters from Allstate and our bank along with pictures of the office in Logan. That matter is currently pending investigation.


July 8th. We had continued to call our agent's office without any answer. That afternoon, the number started to give a busy signal. A little while later, someone answered! I ask for our agent, Brett Turley. I'm told that Brett was selling or had sold his agency and that they were handling Brett's policies. I told him that we had filed a complaint with Allstate and the state of Utah about Brett and were working directly with Allstate at this point. 


On July 12th, we get a call back from Adrienne with Allstate . She says that Allstate was unable to reinstate our policy or issue a new policy backdated to May due to the extended lapse in coverage. Yes, we were denied coverage from Allstate because we were lied to and deceived by our agent for Allstate. This was not met with any measure of joy. After some complaining to Adrienne about the whole thing, we came across some information that they weren't aware of. The fact that our agent submitted our bank a policy sometime in the middle of June, several weeks after the policy had been canceled. With this information, Adrienne submitted another petition for reinstatement. 


Thursday the 14th, Adrienne calls back and says they again declined the policy and that there was nothing further they would do. After some more complaining to Adrienne about the absurdity of the whole thing, we asked her what we were supposed to do given the situation. She had no answer, only saying that in our situation, she probably would have done the same thing and dealt with her agent. 


That's where everything stands at the moment. Our only real hope is that the Utah Insurance Department can get Allstate to do the right thing or at least put some hurt on our agent or Allstate. 


I am completely at a loss. What were we supposed to do? Were we supposed to assume that an Allstate agent, who you can still find on the Allstate website, was lying to us for several months? Were we supposed to assume that the agent was deceiving us? Were we supposed to assume that the agent would write up a policy that we didn't qualify for? I am assuming that by April or May he realized he messed up and it wasn't something he could fix. He was probably already planning on selling his agency and only need to drag things along until after the sale was completed and he wouldn't have to worry about it anymore. 


What am I supposed to do now? I am stuck paying $50/month more for my auto insurance than I should be. I'm trying to find out from Progressive how much more I'm paying and how long I'll pay extra for my coverage because of the lapse. 


Allstate needs to  reinstate the policy backdated to May 26th without any charge and should refund the money I had paid for the policy. It's really the only way that Allstate can make things right at this point.


TL;DR - Allstate agent lied to us for months telling us our policy was fine when it had actually been canceled over 40 days ago. Our agent has now become unreachable and is selling his agency. Allstate is refusing to help.