Fire Lessons: Insurance
5 + 15 THINGS I LEARNED DEALING WITH MY INSURANCE COMPANY AFTER MY HOME BURNED DOWN IN THE WOOLSEY FIRE, 2018
(This is primarily for renters, not homeowners – assuming you have or can get renters/fire insurance)
IN CASE YOUR HOME IS NOT IN DANGER OF BURNING (AND YOU’RE NOT ALREADY EVACUATED):
1. Spend a tiny amount of time (even 15 minutes) to video your home – walls, closets, drawers and even better, individually photograph your valuables. You will love yourself for having done so when you have to prove to the insurance company what was there before the fire
2. If being fastidious is your jam, click your receipts when you buy stuff and send them into the Cloud with a receipt app
3. If you are a renter, make sure you have Renter’s Insurance; if a homeowner then that your contents are insured
4. It may well be worth paying for at least double the Renter’s Insurance (or Contents Insurance for homeowners) you think your stuff is worth. My estimate was so off that my policy covered 50% less than what I could have rightfully claimed and been reimbursed for. Better to have paid and lost $20 per month extra for your beefy policy than lose the additional thousands you could have received. It was many tens of thousands in my case. Expensive lesson.
5. Yes, stuff adds up fast if you have nice things: jewelry, electronics, rugs, art, furniture. You’d be surprised!
IF YOUR HOME HAS BURNED:
1. Treat your adjuster as an ally; you’ve been paying them for years to do the job you are unfortunately now needing them to do. Make sure you keep reminding yourself of that, and them, if necessary
2. Be very nice and respectful to your adjuster (it could gain you thousands of dollars much more easily and quickly) AND don’t be a pushover. Stick to your guns with dollar values, payment turn arounds, etc – and stay consistent, firm, and polite. Most likely, they are dealing with lots of people who are also going through lots of loss and pushing on them hard – and taking their anger and feelings of helplessness out on them. They will make you more of a priority if you aren’t one of them
3. Some insurance companies will give you an advance just to buy some clothes and cover basic needs (they sent me $20,000) within weeks. At least in 2018, some insurance companies (and depending on your policy) also give per diems and/or will set you up with temporary housing. I opted against this as I didn’t want to be in the kind of corporate apartments/hotels they were offering because of my dog, and fortunately, I had somewhere else I could live. But being put up in a place they have arranged for frazzled you, obviously, is a big blessing for many. If you are a homeowner who has to make the difficult decision whether to rebuild on the trauma site, or you are a renter who intends to go back to renting the place when your land people rebuild, you can ask for long term temporary housing (and you could tell the insurance companies you intend to go back even if you don’t know for sure there will even be a place to re-rent). My insurance company, the excellent USAA, was willing to pay an amount ABOVE what I had been paying for rent for ONE year as long as it was a comparable amount of square footage/quality. For example, if you were renting 450 square foot studio for $1500 and want your insurance company to pay a $2000 difference for a 900 square foot 2-bedroom with a rent of $3500, they no will do. Plus then, at the end of the year, it would be up to you to pay the full $3500/month. But if you find a place that’s 450-ish square feet, your insurance may pay the difference in rent even if it’s a chunk more expensive
4. Seasoned adjusters will likely know when you are lying about values – certainly about rents, and also, about your belongings. I asked mine how. She said after 20 years of assessing people’s stuff, and assessing people, she could tell by the quality of what’s in your photos, your behavior, your clothing. Behave well, dress expensively when you meet if you can, show them photos of your highest quality things
5. You’ll have to also provide receipts for what you can, but even without them (they may have burned or you may not have saved them) they can tell A LOT from the above
6. If you don’t have virtual receipts to print, you can contact vendors for copies or new renditions of the receipts (all mine burned) for your big-ticket items. Everyone will likely be nice (I experienced only one exception) – everyone fears their home burning
7. Several clothing companies not only helped me replace some of the same items that had burned but they gave me discounts. There are a lot of lovely people out there, and kind companies, who will be very sympathetic to your situation. There are other fire “victims” who are lying and taking advantage of that compassion, so hopefully your true need will shine through
8. You will have to work HARD for your reimbursement of all, or even part, of what you lost. It will take hours and hours, months of weeks of hours to compile an excel sheet of every item you can remember, list, and ideally prove with photos and/or receipts. It will suck. With any high-ticket items – and this is where tons of time can come in – make sure you also add diligently (and likely painstakingly) researched links to comparable items to prove current replacement value. Easy with refrigerators, not so with antiques or artwork. If you lose a lot of antiques and/or one-of-a-kind things like I did, it makes it all the more difficult to find comparable things but it will likely be worth it. One of the most valuable (and heartbreaking) things I lost was a first edition, leather and gold-leaf bound, Arthur Rackham illustrated Grimm’s Fairytales that my grandparents gave me for my tenth birthday. Still haunts me I didn’t grab that one more so small thing and stuff it in my almost full car. It turns out that the only single one like it I could find online was going for $10,000! My point being, as we know from Antiques Roadshow and common sense, things we’ve had, particularly our whole lives, can have surprising economic value as well as sentimental value. As for the sentimental value aspect, refer to #5 of SIXTEEN THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT POSSESSIONS & PROCESSING LOSS.
9. Be thorough and go as far over the limit as you can of your policy (include appreciation and maybe depreciation for credibility where applicable) despite all the extra time it takes. This will help it be a waste of time for your adjuster to haggle. I listed almost twice the value of what my policy covered – so depressing. I totally blew it on my estimate of owned value. But my inventory list was so comprehensive, and any item they could squabble about was so easily replaceable by dozens of other items I also listed, that they didn’t bother contesting any of it. I received the full value of my policy within days, no questions asked.
10. If you can’t get it done yourself (it is a painful task) or with the committed help of a loved one, for heaven’s sake, hire someone competent to help you if you possibly can. Preferably that person would be a millennial (or younger) and/or someone who loves to shop online. You are reverse shopping – and also potentially future shopping for what you want to buy to replace your stuff once you can afford to. What you pay them is worth the months of agonizing procrastination and the damn thing hanging over you. And you will likely get more money with that less emotional help than you would have in your frazzled state alone – or worse, bickering with another traumatized family member. You could consider the hire an excellent investment into your future economy, and your (and your family’s) present sanity. It also breaks up some of the pain of having to review what you lost; begin to face what you cannot replace; have help finding comparable things and judge which are the wise choices (not too high, not too low, not too many –this is treacherous ground for compulsive buys)
11. Consider giving your helper a nice bonus when that reimbursement check comes in. It felt really good to me to do that – maybe it will for you, too. And it helped with a sense of closure that that Herculean task was finally behind me. It was only then that I could move on
12. Creating such an inventory list (since few of us have one hanging around in our files prior to such a tragic loss, unless perhaps for an epic divorce) is an additional trauma – at least it was for me. It was the proverbial salt in the wound, coarse and scrubbed into raw flesh. Every photo I searched for, documented, dissected, researched, forced me to look at, and feel, all that I, my family and the world had just lost. So many beautiful handmade works of art and love; my great grandmother’s china; timeless clothes that suited me perfectly; a sculpture my dad made in high school; dozens of pieces of jewelry melted to the dust we all will return to. It’s a hard, literal trial by fire and ultimately a rewarding, spiritual practice that changes one in obvious and unimaginable ways, both devastating and dare I say, divine…AND it sucks bigtime
13. Having a contentious relationship or battle with an insurance company, permitting laws, governmental agencies could cause and yet further trauma. Gratefully, I cannot speak to that as that was not my experience – and I so hope it won’t be yours.
14. Get help – oh, did I already say that?
15. Lastly, a few quotes (I apologize for lack of attribution except for the last) that have helped me and my materialistic suffering:
· “Be present for your own undoing.”
· “When your life falls apart you get a whole new life.”
· “Blessed are the cracked, for they shall let in the light.” – Groucho Marx