Raymond Schneider is the owner of CYA, Cover Your Assets Insurance out of Longmont. He was raised in
the North East, in Ovid, Colorado and he’s an independent agent that sells property, casualty, and life
insurance.
Property and casualty meaning your home and auto insurance.
“I also do commercial insurance,” he added when he talked to YourBoulder.com recently for this
interview. “We can do anything from car washes to mom and pop shops to restaurants… I sell insurance
through Safeco, Nationwide, Travelers, Bristol West, Safeway insurance, Progressive Insurance… Let’s
see what else is there….”
Raymond’s an expert when it comes to the insurance business because he’s been doing it for 28 years
and has spent 27 and half of those with the Shelter Insurance company.
“I started in Nebraska as an agent, as a district manager for 14 and a half years and recruited for the last
nine years, so I have a multitude of vast experience. I have insurance experience. I’ve sold insurance.
I’ve managed people selling insurance and I’ve recruited people to get into the insurance business. I am
licensed to sell insurance in Colorado and Nebraska. I just did Nebraska because that’s where I have lots
of personal contacts that I can do insurance for, but I do most of the insurance in the Front Range of
Colorado. I have agents that work for me out of the Fort Collins area and the Denver area, and I’m
working getting another one here in Longmont to be working with me. I have an office in Prospect
which is in the south edge of Longmont in a subdivision. I retired from shelter insurance in April (2019)
and started the independent agency in May.”
Raymond told YourBoulder.com that Cover Your Assets Insurance is way different than your average insurance company.
“Like when I was working with Shelter Insurance companies,” he explained, “that’s a captive agency. All
you can do is sell insurance with Shelter Insurance companies. It’s the same thing that goes with State
Farm. They can only sell for State Farm Insurance…. What I have is I have access to all markets. I have a
rating program and I put it in and I get rates from all the companies and I choose the best rate for the
right client.”
He also mentioned, “Some people have issues with SR-22s. I have complete access to SR-22s filings with
a multitude of companies.”
Raymond’s best advice on insurance companies is this:
“Mostly you just go with the one that gives you the best service and that’s pretty much what it’s all
about, Evan,“ he continued with an example on how the insurance business world works, “If you find a
good agent, you’ll never leave that person. They’ll leave an insurance company in a heartbeat, but they
do not want to leave that agent and that’s what the advantage of me is with my deal now is, they can
leave nationwide, they can leave Travelers, they can leave Safeco, but they still have me and that’s the
whole thing because we can quote it every year and see which one’s the best out there.”
We went on to ask Raymond Schneider a few more questions, to find out about him, his company and
how he can help you with your insurance needs. Continue to read the interview below.
Why were you initially interested in getting into this industry?
Basically, after I was married and divorced in Nebraska, I started selling cancer insurance on the road,
knocking on doors, selling insurance to farmers and it was the worst job in the world… I got approached
at the same time to have this job, this career opening, with Shelter Insurance in the town that I was
living in. You mean I can sit in an office and people come to me and all I got to do is make a few phone
calls and sell insurance? and it was a piece of cake. I just thrived on it. I mean, I never really thought
about getting into insurance. I was living on a farm and ranch in Nebraska. I ran a head cow-calf
operation upon 2000 acres.
So you were a cattle rancher?
Yes, cow-calf operation.
What kind of insurance does someone who does cattle ranching need?
What a farm policy is, is like a personal policy, which has your home and auto, but then you also have a
commercial aspect of it that covers the farm items, the equipment, the tractors, the whatever it also
takes to run the farm and it’s kind of a business policy put together with an umbrella policy, a blanket
policy, to all those items. If it was stolen or whatever else could happen to it.
What do you tell people that ask how to save money on their insurance?
Everybody should get an insurance review every couple of years… Let’s say you’re insured with State
Farm. They go two years, three years down the road and they say, Hey! We can lower your premium
down to this amount of money and all you have to do is accept a 1% deductible! Now, what would that
mean to you as a person who really doesn’t deal in the insurance business at a 1% deductible?… Our
homes in Colorado all range in-between 5 to $800,000 dollars. So now you have a 1% deductible. If you
have a claim you have to pay the first 1%, so your house is worth $500,000 dollars the first $5000 of that
claim is yours! I run into that consistently that people are just shocked… It’s one of those things. You
really need to get an insurance review. There are no costs to those whatsoever. All we do is we just take a
look at your policies, we quote ‘em out, we give you a different quote and then a side by side
comparison, which is basically apple for apple comparison, then with that I save pretty much everybody
I come in contact with pretty close $800 to $1000 dollars, and every time that I talk to somebody, and I
give them the same coverage if not better than what they have!
How long does a review take?
We can take like a twenty-minute sit down together and talk about and gather all the information we
need and then just give me a half a day or whatever to get the quotes back to ya. What I do is put it on
the spreadsheet, give you a side by side comparison and let you know what it is and then I give you my
recommendations and what I would sell.
I think it’s really important everyone have a million dollar umbrella policy on top of all your over
coverages… Most pickups out in the world right now are $80,000 to $90,000 dollars, so you only have
$15,000 dollars in coverage?? They’re going to own you for the rest of your life! You know, that’s not a good deal.
That’s why you have insurance to protect yourself so you don’t have to be owned by
somebody… Then on the other side of it, being a person who does the right thing and takes care of the
insurance, you have uninsured and underinsured motorist and that takes care of that person who has
the 20/50/15 liability property damage limits. They’re underinsured, so you’ll take their money, but
then your insurance company kicks in and gives you the coverage that you provided someone else…
That’s what I can provide I can provide you all the scenarios and give you the best-case scenario that’s
going to be right for you that’s still going to be affordable!
How’d you come up with your business name?
We came up with CYA, Cover Your Assets, my wife said, “Why not cover your assets insurance?” As far as my wife
goes, my wife and have been together since 2010, nine years. We were high school sweethearts… I was
her first kiss and told her I was going to be her last kiss! She lived in Denver and I lived in Nebraska.
After 38 years she found me on Facebook. She was in South Africa working. When she got back we got
together for coffee and that was it”
What’s the “Conference of Champions?” Did you win an award?
I was only an agent for four and a half years. I qualified for Paris, like Netherlands, Switzerland, went to
Conference of Champions in San Diego. As a district manager, I won the “District of the Year” managing
agent and I won that one in Vancouver, Canada on that trip… That’s what Conference of Champions is.
It’s an all-expense-paid trip to honor the top producer, top ten percent, of the company and producers
and what we’ll do, we’ll take 150 agents and managers or whatever combination of agents/managers
and go to Switzerland and have a four or five-day conference. We’ll have a couple meetings and most of
the time just sight-seeing and enjoying the sights.
What have you done with “Tough Angels” and the “Longmont Victim Advocates?”
Tough Angels is my wife’s non-profit. She works with women and children of abuse, sexual violence.
She has a safehouse in Nairobi, Kenya. She sponsors education grants for children in South Africa. (The)
philosophy in South Africa is that the cure for AIDs in South Africa is having sex with a virgin, so that’s
why there’s a lot of rapes and molestations of young children in Africa… that’s why the education grants
to educate the kids, to realize to try to break the cycle of what goes on. Now, with the Victim’s
Advocates I was with the Longmont Police Department. We would go out and assist the police in
helping, like let’s say there was a death notification, so the officers have more to do than to just talk to
the grieving parents of a child who’s just been killed in a car accident, so we would go in there as
advocates and we would sit with them, console them, give them different options with what happened.
We do that with death notifications, sexual abuse. Then also we dealt with domestic violence, too, as
well, we’d give them options of what they have at their fingertips, places to go, safehouses they can go
to if they’ve been abused and things like that. That’s what a victim’s advocates was.
Do you have your own philosophy or principles on life and money that you follow?
Yes, I do. On life insurance side my deal is you should always have like term insurance to cover your
debts and whatever you would need and then you need some permanent policy and the permanent
policy would be like a Whole Life, Universal Life and that’s for basically at end of life to bury yourself.
You can buy as many life insurance policies and term policies as time dictates, so a lot of times, you
know, for a young individual, I sell mostly like a millionaire 30 (year) term policy I can sell for fifty to sixty dollars a month.
That’s going to get most people to the point of they can retire, to their retirement
age… So then really all you would need is just a small life insurance policy to put yourself away. A burial
policy. In the meantime, you’re growing yourself. You’re growing your nest egg and you have your
family covered in case something would happen to you as a money earner in the family. The same thing
goes with the wife. It takes two incomes nowadays to live, especially in Colorado, so if one of ‘em has a
million the other party needs a million as well if not half a million.
To talk to Raymond Schneider about your own insurance needs or to get a review, click HERE check out his website.
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