What made you want to do the work you do? Please share the full story.
I studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with the plan of writing about anything except insurance, honestly. What pulled me in was a freelance assignment early on explaining deductibles to a general audience, and I realized how much confusion existed around basic terms people were expected to just know before buying a policy. Nobody had ever broken it down for them in plain language.
That gap became the thing I wanted to work on full time. Insurance Navy gave me the room to dig into the actual mechanics of coverage, not just headline numbers, and write guides that treat the reader like someone capable of understanding the details if you explain them properly. That’s still what drives most of what I publish now.
How is AI changing your business? What changes are you making to adapt?
AI has changed how people arrive at our content before they ever read a word of it. A growing number of readers are getting a summarized version of coverage questions from an assistant first, then coming to our guides to verify or go deeper, which means the accuracy of what we publish matters even more than it used to.
What I’ve changed is writing with more direct, extractable answers near the top of each guide instead of building up to the point slowly. If someone asks an assistant what an uninsured motorist policy actually covers, I want our explanation to be the clear, correct one that gets surfaced, not a vague paragraph buried three sections down.
What are the 3 things you like best about your work and why?
I like untangling state-specific requirements, because DUI insurance rules alone can vary so much between states that getting them right actually helps someone avoid a costly mistake. I like the research itself, cross-referencing how carriers like Geico, Dairyland, and National General handle the same coverage type differently, since those gaps are exactly what readers need clarified. And I like hearing when a guide actually changed how someone approached their policy, because that means the writing did its job.
What do you think are your 3 biggest weaknesses and how are you overcoming them?
I used to over-explain edge cases in every guide instead of trusting the reader to look up the rare scenario separately, which made some articles longer than they needed to be. I’ve gotten better at keeping the core guide focused and linking out to edge cases instead of cramming them in. I also tend to hold onto a draft longer than necessary chasing one more source, which I’ve addressed by setting a firmer research cutoff before I start writing.
The third is assuming familiarity with insurance terms that general readers don’t actually have, since I’ve been immersed in this world long enough that some jargon stopped feeling like jargon to me. I’ve started testing drafts on people outside the industry before publishing to catch that blind spot.
Tell us about a time you were dead wrong about something.
I once assumed that most readers researching DUI insurance requirements already understood the difference between SR-22 and standard coverage reinstatement, so an early guide I wrote treated that distinction as background knowledge rather than explaining it directly. Reader feedback made clear that was the exact confusion driving people to search for the topic in the first place.
I rewrote the guide to lead with that distinction instead of assuming it, and it became one of the better-performing pieces I’ve published. It taught me that the questions readers don’t think to ask are usually more important to answer than the ones they do.
What is the biggest challenge you face each day and how do you handle it?
The biggest challenge is writing about coverage details that change often enough that a guide can go stale faster than people expect. State minimums shift, carrier rules get updated, and a piece that was accurate six months ago can quietly mislead someone if nobody catches the change. I handle it by building a recurring review pass into my workflow instead of treating publication as the finish line for a guide.
Every few months I go back through older articles and check the numbers and requirements against current sources rather than assuming they still hold. It’s slower than just writing new content constantly, but readers making insurance decisions deserve information that reflects what’s actually true right now, not what was true when I first hit publish.
What do you value most and why?
I value clarity over completeness, which sounds like a strange thing to prioritize in an industry built on fine print. Insurance guides can easily turn into dense walls of caveats that technically cover every scenario but leave the average reader more confused than when they started. I’d rather explain the core answer clearly and note the exceptions separately than bury the main point under every possible edge case.
That comes from years of watching people make coverage decisions based on guides they didn’t fully understand, which usually costs them later. Clarity is what actually protects someone, not a technically comprehensive paragraph they skimmed past. If a reader walks away from one of my guides understanding their coverage better than they did before, the piece did its job.
What achievement are you the proudest of and why?
I’m proudest of the guide I rewrote on uninsured motorist coverage, since it started as a fairly standard explainer and turned into one of the more thorough breakdowns I’ve published on stacking, bodily injury versus property damage, and how requirements differ by state. It took real digging to get every state’s nuance right instead of generalizing across all of them.
What made it worth the effort was hearing from readers who said it actually helped them understand a coverage type most people ignore until they need it. That’s the kind of impact I set out to have when I moved from general journalism into insurance writing, and that piece is the clearest example of it actually landing.
Who is your favorite motivational speaker and why?
I don’t really follow motivational speakers in the traditional sense, but I’ve always found more to learn from investigative journalists who spend months untangling a complicated topic until it becomes understandable to a general reader. That patience with complexity is close to what motivates my own work, even though the subject matter is different.
Watching someone take a genuinely confusing system and make it legible without oversimplifying it is more instructive to me than a stage speech ever could be. It’s a reminder that clarity takes real effort, and that the effort is worth it when someone finally understands something that used to confuse them.
If you do charity or volunteer work, what is it and why do you do it?
I’ve volunteered with local financial literacy programs that help young adults understand basic contracts and agreements before they sign them, which naturally overlaps with the kind of confusion I see around insurance policies. Most of the sessions focus on things like leases and loans, but insurance questions come up constantly once people realize I work in the field.
I do it because the same gap that pulled me into insurance writing shows up everywhere financial decisions get made without enough plain explanation first. Helping someone understand a document before they sign it, rather than after something goes wrong, is exactly the kind of work that feels worth doing outside of my regular job too.
Who has been your biggest mentor in life (personal or professional) and how have they helped you?
An editor I worked under early in my journalism career taught me to always ask who the reader actually is before writing a single word, rather than assuming a general audience meant no audience at all. She pushed back on drafts that sounded polished but didn’t actually answer the question someone would have typed into a search bar to get there. That distinction between sounding informative and being useful shaped how I’ve approached every guide since.
She also modeled a kind of stubbornness about accuracy that I’ve carried into insurance writing specifically, since getting a coverage detail wrong isn’t just a stylistic miss, it can actually cost a reader money. Whenever I’m tempted to round a detail off for the sake of a cleaner sentence, I still hear her asking whether that’s actually true or just easier to write. That habit has probably saved more than one guide from being technically fine but practically unhelpful.
Just for fun, what is your favorite ice cream flavor?
Mint chocolate chip, without hesitation. It’s a divisive flavor and I know it, but there’s something about the contrast between the mint and the chocolate that keeps it interesting in a way plain vanilla never quite manages.