Holiday time - check your values and renewals!

Each year, it is a great idea for you to review your homeowner's policies and your real estate appraised value to be sure that automatic increases aren't busting your family's budget without your being aware.

Each year, without specifically telling you, both your homeowner's insurance and the local appraisal district will increase the value they believe your home is worth. Sometimes, the justification is inflation and more recently, it's been value appreciation due to market conditions.

Appraisal districts of late have been especially confusing, with some values going up in spite of neighborhood performance, and some dropping to meet actual market conditions. Each year, you get a written "Notice of appraised value" which gives you specific guidelines on protesting that valuation and deadlines that must be met.

When you get that valuation, you should check it against what you believe your home is currently worth. If you are uncertain of what your home is worth, ask your Realtor for help. Some counties take online protests, others require that you mail in the form enclosed with your valuation notice.

In either case, having a current broker price opinion, provided by a Realtor, should be attached to your protest to give some evidence of correct value. If you recently bought your home or property, a copy of your settlement statement is the best proof of what your property is worth.

What is it worth to you?

The average property tax rate in Texas is just under 3% of assessed value. So, for every $10,000 in assessed value that your property rises or falls, it means $300 to you directly.

Insurance is even more hazardous to your financial health -

With both car and property insurance, they love to creep up premiums. All those Allstate and Nationwide ads that say they're cheaper? Only in the first year, and then things start to climb.

There are two ways that they can run your premiums up without you noticing - first, by increasing the "replacement cost" value, the premiums increase while their actual exposure to risk is decreasing because of depreciation. Also, by creeping up the premiums charged without adjusting the value, they can increase their income a second time.

It's all on you to keep an eagle eye on them - there are several sites on which you can cross-shop insurance rates, and don't be at all shy to switch carriers once a year - frequently by cross-shopping and calling your agent to tell him of your intent to switch, they'll suddenly find that some oversights were made and your premiums will drop back to what you started with.

More important than are New Year resolutions, taking an hour or two to check into these simple matters can save you a couple thousand dollars each year.

Audi, the automated brand - FAIL

Lately, I've been very focused on how auto dealers, independent businesses all, respond to internet inquiries and email communications.

Most of them do a terrible job.

Case in point, Houston has only a handful of Audi stores, Momentum being the biggest. A few months back, they had a red Audi A6 sitting right out front of their store. On the street. In the sunshine. I called.

They didn't know whether it was used or new. They didn't know what year model it was, or how much it was. They didn't know how it was equipped. They did know that it was red. On the phone. With the Audi 'consultant'.

I stopped in. Wasn't interested in the car after looking at it.

Fast forward nearly three months.

This morning, I responded to another of their automated emails from their leadtracker system.

I'll let my email to the sales manager at Momentum speak for itself:

Scott -

We meet a few months back at your store when I came in for a scheduled appointment.

I am responding to this automated email that I received today:

"Dear Douglas Hord,

We are reviewing recent requests for vehicles and noticed you have not responded. The Internet Sales process starts with a consumer requesting information on a website and this information is forwarded to our dealership. Our next step is to contact these individuals and do what we can to help them get into a new vehicle. If your needs have changed, please click here to request additional information and we'll be happy to provide you with the information you need.

Our Internet Department works with hundreds of consumers a month. To update our records, can you send us a quick e-mail to let us know if you have bought elsewhere of if you would like us to touch base with you at a later date."

I had sent you a fairly lengthy email some time back, but it didn't gain your notice or response.

This time I'll keep it short.

I have replied to the automated emails. The information I have responded with has been either lost in transmission through lead tracker or ignored by your sales staff entirely. After receiving a similar email to the one quoted above only three days ago, I called Connie Nims and left her a voice mail telling her that I had gone a different direction and thanking her for her help.

Today, I get this (quoted above).

I don't know whether your store is angling for the Chevy Cobalt buyer who just came into some extra cash, or whether you're seeking an educated, attuned, sophisticated client base.

Your choice of automation software and your implementation of it tells me that the first is more accurate.



( Please type in your request info that you need).

Douglas Hord
Solutions Consultant

You'd THINK that would be of use and/or interest, wouldn't you?

Here's what I received in way of response:

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

scott.montgomery@momentumaudi.net

Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 Mailbox unavailable or access denied - (state 14).

----- Original message -----

Received: by 10.204.10.149 with SMTP id p21mr3518423bkp.3.1258045644326;
Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:07:24 -0800 (PST)
Return-Path:
Received: from ?192.168.1.101? (adsl-99-163-107-73.dsl.hstntx.sbcglobal.net [99.163.107.73])
by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id 16sm921754bwz.7.2009.11.12.09.07.22
(version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=RC4-MD5);
Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:07:23 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <4AFC40C1.6040904@douglashord.com>
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:07:13 -0600
From: Douglas Hord
Reply-To: dhord@douglashord.com
Organization: Douglas Hord
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 (Windows/20090812)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: scott.montgomery@momentumaudi.net
Subject: Requesting more info
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="------------040404020307050006030704"