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Strategies & Market Trends : Dividend investing for retirement -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dr. Ipsofacto who wrote (4307)	4/2/2010 8:57:03 AM
From: MoneyPenny	Respond to of 34328

Chubb is the Rolls Royce of property insurance. Got 4 multi-million dollar homes? They will give you a discount. I had a client once who had a toilet run for 2 days while they were away. It did almost 500k damage to fine rugs, furniture, woodworking etc. Chubb put them up in a suite in the best hotel in town, picked up all their food costs over $150 a day (for the two of them), paid for lost wages by their help, and my fees to fly up to do the restoration and the restoration itself. <edit> Most of these homes have great security, etc. so the chance of a claim is remote but the premiums would take your breath away. Very profitable business. I recently bought CB.

To: Dr. Ipsofacto who wrote (4307)	4/4/2010 5:31:17 PM
From: Logain Ablar	Respond to of 34328

IMO Chubb & Travelers are probably the top two public P&C carriers with Chubb having a higher reputation for claim paying. Note Travelers while being around for a long time has a troubled history. I do believe they are now in the same class as Chubb (from a finanical perspective not claims paying). Travelers ran into difficulty in the 1980's with real estate and ended up being acquired by Sandy Weill (I forget the name of Sandy's old holding company but he changed the whole group to Travelers for name recognition, i.e. Travelers was one of only 4 sponsors for the Masters). Travelers then merged with Citibank (the merger was contingent upon the banking laws being changed and look where that led us and Citi for that matter). Now Travelers was Life, Health and P&C with the Health going to United before the Citi deal. The Life is now part of Met Life and the P&C was spun off from Citi in the 2001 time frame. Now Travelers acquired Aetna's P&C (which created a drag on the P&C as Aetna had a huge indemnitiy on its reinsurance business sold to Kolberg Kravis (American Re which is now Munich Re US) and this had legacy environmental and asbestos exposure). At the time of the Aetna acquisition Bob Lipp was President and Jay Fishman was CFO of Travelers (1996). Both smart top Sandy guys who understood risk and expenses. Jay left Citi (I understand due to Sandy not wanting to spin off Travelers P&C, which he did later) and became Chairman of St Paul. St Paul was in dire straights (med malpractice and reinsurance to name two) but he was able to stop the bleeding but not completely turn it around. Citi finally spun off Travelers with Bob Lipp being Chairman. Within a year Bob merged with St Paul and Travelers then had to take over a $1 billion hit to strengthen St Paul reserves. Since that last hit with the ST Paul merger, Travelers has been doing great but like all P&C carriers took some decent hits with the hurricanes. I believe the dividend is important to Jay and as long as Jay is at Travelers its a dividend stock worth considering.