The 3 Coverage Gaps Almost Every Florida Driver Has (And How to Close Them Before You Need To)

A family came to me for a policy review through my Auto Coverage Concierge, not because they had been in a crash, but because they wanted to understand what they actually had.

When I read their policy, they were missing stacked uninsured motorist coverage. It is an inexpensive add-on, and it simply was not on their page. They added it on my recommendation. Months later, they were in a crash, and they recovered under that added coverage. That was money that would not have existed if they had not sat down and looked at the page first.

That family is the reason I read policies for people before anything goes wrong. When I go through one line by line, the same three gaps show up again and again. None of them are exotic. All of them are fixable in an afternoon. And almost nobody knows they are there until the day they need the coverage and find out it was never on the page.

Summer is when this matters most. More cars on I-95, more families driving to the beach and back, more teenagers on the road. The policy you have today is the policy you are stuck with if something happens tomorrow. Here are the three gaps I find, in the order they tend to hurt people.

Gap 1: You probably have little or no bodily injury liability coverage

Florida is one of only two states in the country that does not require drivers to carry bodily injury liability. The only auto coverage the state makes you buy is ten thousand dollars of Personal Injury Protection and ten thousand dollars of Property Damage Liability. That is the whole legal minimum.

PIP covers a portion of your own injuries. Property Damage covers the other person's car. Neither one covers the other person's body.

So here is what happens when a driver carrying only state-minimum coverage causes a real crash. Their PIP pays up to ten thousand toward their own treatment. The other family, the one with the broken vertebrae and the surgery and the six weeks out of work, looks to the at-fault driver for their medical bills and finds nothing there. No bodily injury coverage means those bills come after the driver personally, which puts their home, their savings, and their paycheck on the line.

If this were my family, I would not drive in Florida with zero bodily injury coverage. I would carry it whether or not the state required it, because the day I cause a crash and hurt someone, the difference between having it and not having it is whether an insurance company writes the check or whether a lawyer like me is looking at your house.

Gap 2: Your uninsured motorist coverage is too low, or you waived it without realizing

Gap 1 creates Gap 2, and this is the one that hurts good families the most.

Because so many Florida drivers carry no bodily injury coverage, the person who hits you may have nothing for you to collect from. They might carry no bodily injury coverage, they might carry nothing at all, or they might have left the scene and never be found.

Uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage, the line on your policy marked UM or UM/UIM, is the coverage that steps in exactly then. It pays for your surgery, your lost paychecks, and your pain when the at-fault driver cannot. It is the only line on your policy that exists to protect you and your passengers rather than the other guy.

The family I mentioned at the top recovered for exactly this reason. The driver who hits you may carry the bare state minimum, may carry nothing at all, or may leave the scene and never be found. When that happens, the only thing standing between your family and the full cost of the crash is your own UM coverage. If it is set at ten thousand dollars, ten thousand is what there is. The difference for that family was that they had raised and stacked their UM before they ever needed it.

And UM is the line I most often find sitting at the bottom of the page. Families carry a hundred thousand dollars in coverage to protect strangers and ten thousand to protect themselves. Or they signed a waiver during an online sign-up years ago, declined UM to save a few dollars a month, and have no memory of ever doing it.

When you look at your own policy, the number that actually protects you is the UM number. If it is the smallest figure on the page, that is backwards.

Gap 3: Your UM is non-stacked when it could be stacked

This one is almost a secret, because most people are never offered the choice in language they understand.

If you have two or more vehicles on your policy, Florida lets you stack your uninsured motorist coverage across them. Fifty thousand dollars of UM on two cars becomes a hundred thousand of available coverage when you stack it. The premium difference is usually small, often a few dollars a month, because you are choosing how the coverage you already pay for gets applied, not buying a whole new layer.

Most people who have non-stacked UM did not choose it on purpose. They clicked through an online quote, took the cheaper default, and never saw the word. When I find non-stacked coverage on a two-car or three-car household, it is the easiest fix on the whole page and one of the biggest jumps in protection a family can make for the money.

What good coverage actually looks like

People always ask me for a number, so here is how I think about it for my own family. I want my bodily injury liability and my uninsured motorist coverage set well above the state floor. I want my UM to match my bodily injury limit rather than trail it. And if there is more than one car in the driveway, I want that UM stacked.

I am not going to hand you a single figure that fits every household, because the right amount depends on what you have to protect and what you can carry. But the families who sleep best after a crash are almost never the ones who bought the minimum. They are the ones who looked at the page on purpose and set the numbers that protect them where they could see them.

How to close these in an afternoon

You do not need to read your whole policy. You need one page.

1. Pull your declarations page. Your insurer calls it the dec page. It is the one-page summary of what you carry, and it is in your insurer's app or your email. If you cannot find it, call and ask them to send it.

2. Find three lines. Bodily Injury Liability. Uninsured/Underinsured Motorist. And whether your UM says stacked or non-stacked.

3. Compare the two numbers. Look at your bodily injury limit and your UM limit side by side. If the UM number is much smaller than the bodily injury number, or if the page shows you rejected UM, that is the gap you want to close first.

4. Make the call. Call your agent and ask three things. Can I add or raise bodily injury liability. Can I raise my uninsured motorist coverage to match it. And if I have more than one car, can I stack my UM. Write down what they quote you. In my experience these changes cost far less than families expect, because the coverage that protects you is some of the cheapest coverage on the policy.

Or let me read it for you

I built the Auto Policy Review for exactly this. You upload your declarations page and a little household information, and within forty-eight hours I send you back a one-page map of what you have, where your gaps are, and what I would change. You get a good, better, and best option to fit your budget, plus a short script you can read straight off your phone when you call your agent. No commissions, no pressure, no pitch for coverage you do not need.

The best time to find these three gaps is on an ordinary Tuesday when nothing is wrong. The worst time is from a hospital bed, after the crash, when whatever is on the page is already the only thing you have.

If you want me to read your page, here is where to start.

Danielle

P.S. We're giving away a new dash cam plus a free auto policy review with me to one Florida driver this week. To enter, head to Instagram, follow @kushellawgroup and @danikushel, and follow the steps on the giveaway post. Open to Florida residents 18+. Entries close Friday 6/12 at 11:59 PM ET.