How you can take a home inventory using GoogleDrive

Recently we talked about why home inventories are vital when it comes to home insurance. Creating a home inventory helps you ensure that you have enough coverage for your home, and it makes filing a claim for fire or burglary much easier. Making a list of all of the belongings in each room of your house might sound tedious, but we’ve got a suggestion for a more tech-friendly way of conducting your home inventory.

If you’re familiar with GoogleDrive, you know that it’s an online file storage system that you can access from any internet-connected device. Anything you create or type into a Google document (simply called a GoogleDoc) within Drive is saved, and it’s a way to avoid keeping your all-important and all-inclusive inventory in your home where it could be destroyed.

Read More

Eight boating safety tips you need to know

Boating is a favorite spring and summer activity for lots of people. When the weather turns warm, the water beckons. While it’s important to make sure that your boat has the proper insurance, it’s also important to be safe. Despite the inherent danger of being around boats, you can reduce the risk of something bad happening by setting some “boating safety” rules for your passengers. When you’re around boats, you can’t be too careful.

We’ve put together a few tips to help you stay safe while you have fun on the boat.

Read More

When you're operating a dump truck, safety is key.

Ten tips to stay safe while working with a dump truck

Dump trucks come in a variety of styles and sizes, but one thing that should remain the same across the board is safety. Dump trucks are dangerous at the best of times. Whether you’re the driver or someone helping at the job site, it’s important that you make safety a priority whenever you’re working around a dump truck.

To help keep you safe while working with your dump truck, we’ve come up with ten tips that will keep everyone out of harm’s way.

Read More

The ultimate guide to getting the best (and cheapest) home insurance

Have you ever been completely baffled when it comes to home insurance? Does it make your brain hurt a little? Do you kind of cringe inside when you think about it? Don’t worry. You’re not alone. It gets complicated, and that makes a lot of us want to shove it out of our minds so we don’t have to deal withf it.

But we’re here to help decode the strange language that is homeowners insurance. By the end of reading this article you’ll be fluent. We’ve sectioned this guide into four basic categories to help you with getting not only the best, but also the cheapest homeowners insurance in your state.

We’ve broken this article into four sections that each tackle a home insurance mystery.

Read More

Safety can help you save money on your workers' compensation premium.

How to lower workers’ comp premiums

When an employee gets hurt on the job, the top priority is making sure that they’re okay and that they get the care that they need. So it’s important for employers to have sufficient workers’ compensation coverage to make sure that their employees and their families are provided for if an accident happens on the job. However, there are still a few things that you can do to manage the cost of your workers’ compensation premium. We’ve put together a list of six tips that will help you understand what goes into determining your workers’ compensation premium and explain how you can lower it.

Read More

car break-in

What to do if someone breaks into your car

You decide to stop at the grocery store for some milk and eggs on your way home from work. You’re gone for maybe ten minutes, but by the time you wander out of the store and into the parking lot something terrible has happened. You squint as you approach your car—something looks funny about that window…

And just like that, your day, which has been great so far, isn’t very great anymore. Your car has been broken into. And you’re not alone, either. According to the Insurance Information Institute, almost 710,000 vehicles were reported stolen in 2015, and CNN reports that 1.85 million car thefts (break-ins) occur every year.

If this ever happens to you, there are a few things that you can do that will help the police and your insurance company help you. We’ve created a list of seven tips.

Read More

How can you prevent a car break-in?

Ah, what would we do without our cars? They’re faithful. Reliable (usually). An extension of ourselves. We spend hours upon hours in our cars—stuck in traffic, commuting to work, going grocery shopping, running errands, meeting friends. The amount of time we spend with our cars makes them become part of our personal space. We care about our cars.

So if someone were to ever break into your car, you’d feel violated. Betrayed. Unsafe. That car is your space. It belongs to you and it’s one of your best friends. It just happens to be a best friend that you’re required to leave unattended for hours at a time since you can’t exactly bring your car into the office or house with you. Someone breaking into your car and rifling through your belongings is as personal as if they broke into your home. It would be a nightmare.

Read More

Transportation safety for daycare

Transportation safety tips for daycare and childcare providers

Child care is full of challenges. There’s a lot that goes into running a daycare or childcare facility, and one of those things is getting the children where they need to go. It might be a bus bringing them from school to your center, or it might be taking them on a field trip to have some fun. Getting kids from Point A to Point B can be quite the ordeal—there are lots of potential risks associated with childcare transportation. Whatever the need for transportation or buses might be, there are a few important things to keep in mind to make the process as safe as possible. Just a few simple steps can significantly reduce the chances of something catastrophic happening. We’ve put together six transportation safety tips for daycare providers.

Read More

Playground safety tips for daycares

Kids run on unbelievable stores of energy. They love to run and play outside, thus the invention of the playground. Playgrounds are supposed to be a fun way for kids to get exercise, but they also present plenty of ways for kids to get hurt. If you run a daycare that has a playground, it’s important to make sure that the structures are as safe as possible—the kids’ parents are relying on you to keep their little ones out of harm’s way, and their concerns about outdoor play time aren’t unfounded. According to kidshealth.org, more than 200,000 children per year are taken to the ER because they got hurt on a playground. That number seems really big and scary, but we’ve put together seven playground safety tips to reduce the chances of bumps, bruises, cuts, and even broken bones.  

Read More

Preventing Freezing Pipes

Preventing Frozen Pipes

The need to prevent the pipes in your home from freezing has more to do with the aftermath than the actual freezing of the water in the pipes. We’ve compiled some great tips below to help you to avoid not only the mess and damage of pipe-related issues, but also the expensive issues that follow.

Why are frozen pipes a problem?

Let’s start with the science of water. What happens when you combine water and freezing temperatures? Water freezes. But, water also expands as it freezes. In the case of the pipes in your home, freezing temperatures force the existing water to expand, even if it means breaking the pipe. Regardless of the strength of the pipe or container, you can’t beat science.

When you’re looking around your own home to diagnose which areas are susceptible to frozen pipes, notice the locations exposed to the cold, like outdoor lines, sprinkler lines, unheated areas inside the home, like garages, basements, crawl spaces, kitchen cabinets & attics.

Read More