Well, these have certainly been some of the most trying weeks of my life. Things are slowly getting back to normal, whatever that is. I am taking on some large projects at work and am also spending a fair amount of time dealing with contractors and insurance adjusters from my parent’s fire. The good news is that we are getting closer to actually seeing real progress on the house. I expect that we’ll award the construction contract in the next week or so and then we should see some demolition happening.
We are pleasantly surprised on the contents claim. This is the part of the fire claim that pays us for what was lost in both the shop and damaged items in the house (from smoke). So far, all the refrigerators and freezers are being replaced in the house, as well as the TV’s and some other misc items. The shop is where the large part of the claim is. Our insurance company offered to pay a company to come in to the fire damaged shop to go through everything and make a list. This has turned out to be a very positive thing for us because they identified much more of it than we ever could have. The guy spent a total of about two full days in there and compiled a list of over 500 items. (I’m sure there was more in there, but we are pretty happy with his list at this point). The good news is that my mom won’t be going over her total insurance limits for either the contents or the construction.
I’ve learned a lot of valuable lessons so far. One thing is that it really matters who your insurance company is. I’m not going to do any bashing at this point, but I can tell you that I’ve heard some fairly negative things about my own insurance company so I’ll probably switch to the company that my mom is with. Another thing is that it pays to have a “replacement rider” on your policy. This basically states that you can go out and buy a new item if it is destroyed in the fire and the insurance company will pay the total cost of it. If you don’t have the replacement rider you can expect the insurance company to pay you a depreciated actual cash value for the item. Believe me, that won’t cover the cost of replacing it if it is more than a couple years old. And yet another thing I’ve learned is that, as a whole, most people are underinsured. If the entire house had burned down my mom would be SCREWED. Her policy wasn’t large enough to pay to rebuild both the house and shop. As soon as this is over, I’ll be helping her “up” her policy limits. I would highly recommend checking your homeowners policy to make sure that the limits are high enough to cover both the demolition and debris removal (which can be quite expensive) and also have enough left to completely rebuild the entire structure from the ground up. So, I’d recommend checking out some different insurance companies and look further than just who is cheapest. You should also be looking at how they are rated for handling claims. If anyone knows of a good site that has ratings for insurance companies, please leave it in the comments and then I’ll post it up here.