MSI Insurance | Footnotes

¹ When we talk about MSI we are referring to several companies. These are:

• Mutual Service Casualty Insurance Company. The original and main property/casualty insurer. The premium of this company in 2000 was $x.xM
• Modern Service
• MSI Preferred
• Mutual Service Life Insurance Company
• Mutual ? Services? The company we actually worked for
• MSI Cooperative

² An example of this is the Pension area of MSI. They administered pension plans for small businesses. This is a pretty thin-margin business in which they got paid something like 25 basis points, 0.25%, of the assets in the plan. However, if a new customer whose plan totalled $10 million came in, it was insisted that the internal results showing this be called Revenues. They weren't revenues at all; the revenues would be, over a year's time, 0.25% of $10,000,000, or $25,000. I pointed out that the table was actually Assets on which we earned some administration fee, but I was told that Jim Van Houten wanted this called Revenues and thus revenues it stayed.

³ When we talk about COUNTRY we are also referring to several companies. At various times, this ensemble was called Country Companies, COUNTRY Insurance & Financial Services and then finally just COUNTRY Financial. The component companies are:

• Country Mutual Insurance Company, often known as CMIC. COUNTRY's original and main property/casualty insurer. The premium of this company in 2000 was $x.xM
• Country Preferred Insurance Company, often known as CPIC.
• Country Casualty Insurance Company, aka CCIC, like seasick. The non-standard carrier. This was like MSI's Modern Service Casualty.
• Country Life Insurance Company, which I rarely heard referred to as CLIC. I was most concerned with the property/casualty side of the business.

⁴ I'm counting the $12M surplus note, the $18M surplus note and the purchase of Modern for $22.9M for a combined $52.9M. So, fiddy mill, more or less.

⁵ The writeoffs related to IGF and AgPI totalled $41,244,904. MSC's surplus first exceeded this amount in 1980 but fell back to $33.6M in 1985. In 1986, 52 years after being founded, MSC's surplus went to $43.6M and stayed there and higher until the events related on this page took it below $0. Thus, the AgPI writeoffs wiped out the amount of equity it took MSC slightly more than half a century to build.

Page last updated 1/28/2014