If you don't own your house outright, the bank that owns part of it may require insurance as a prerequisite for loaning you money.
I've long said that one major threat that "regular people" would suffer from the consumer surveillance industry was going to be insurance (another being fine-grained price discrimination). It looks like both are really starting to come into swing. The best time for US privacy legislation (including something analogous to the GDPR) was 20 years ago, the second best time is now.
Sure, but neither of those are due to it being required by law.
In the first case there I don't know what's happening, I guess maybe insurance companies have figured out that people dropping insurance and then picking it back up correlates with increased claims due to stuff that happened during the interim.
In the second case there, you can definitely get liability insurance separately from homeowners. And it's wayyyy cheaper. Or, live in a country that isn't as crazy litigious as e.g. USA.
But again, neither is a legal requirement, which is all I was getting at initially given the top comment in this chain.
But back to the topic - a total catastrophic structure loss would indeed be a problem. But from what I've seen, most insurance claims are not for total losses but rather things like water leaks and roof damage that have much higher sticker prices than what it actually costs to maintain/triage/mitigate/calmly repair. I've known people that have submitted claims for ice dams, oil burner blowbacks, new roofs ("wind damage"), finished basement water damage, etc. I will never submit an insurance claim for those type of things, and so it makes sense to at least consider self insuring, especially when rates are doubling every few years.
