This is what my dad does at a large insurance company and I have no idea what it means. I’m 25 and I feel like it’s too late to ask lol
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If I want to operate a business, sometimes there’s a chance that I could screw up and break something really big. If I’m a doctor, I could prescribe something wrong or do a surgery wrong and kill someone. If I’m a car manufacturer, I could build a car that occasionally catches on fire and burns the people inside to death. If I pour concrete sidewalks, I could do a bad job and create a substantial tripping hazard (obviously not as bad as killing someone, but still a problem that costs more to deal with than the profit I make from that single job).
In order to make sure that the people aren’t completely screwed when they’re victims of big problems that come from a business like that, states require that those businesses keep a big pile of money available to pay out if there is a big problem. That big pile of money is too big for most companies to keep sitting unused all the time, so the businesses buy surety bonds. Those aren’t the same kind of bonds as “stocks and bonds” on Wall Street. They’re bonds like bail bonds.
If I have to keep $1 Million aside in case of a catastrophe, I can go to an insurance company who will figure out how likely it is for me to screw up in that kind of huge way. If the insurance company thinks that there’s a 2% chance that I’ll screw up that big each year, they’ll charge me maybe 2.5% of that million dollars each year and they’ll pay the million dollars if I have that kind of big screw up.
A surety underwriter is the person who tries to figure out how likely it is that my company will screw up in that kind of big way. Your dad is the person who says whether he thinks that I have a 2% chance of really screwing up or a 20% chance or a 0.01% chance of screwing up big time.
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