You wernt the guy on WTOL last night that had a tree AND powerline laying in his living room are you?
You know I’m always joking, but this might not be something to joke about. I went through a tornado in 1998. I was out of the house for a year and a half while it was rebuilt (for full disclosure, we also added a second floor at the time). My wife and I lived like college kids in an empty condo with a mattress on the floor and a kitchen table with two chairs.
One of the problems in a disaster like that is that the insurance companies hire a bunch of independent settlement people who get a bonus if they settle quick. Fortunately, I had the financial resources so I didn’t have to settle quick and I could still rebuild my house. While we got back to the house in a year and a half, we didn’t settle the claim until a year and an half after that. We caught the company in so much bad faith, we settled higher than our policy limits.
25 years later, I’m here, and there are still things that haven’t been fixed completely.
Lessons learned:
If your policy is for the cost to rebuild your house, your limits are too low. It cost another 40% to do the demolition and preserve what was left than it would’ve cost to build it from the slab up.
Get an extra policy to cover your living expenses while you’re out of the house. Insurance company usually only covers it for 90 days.
The biggest mistake everybody makes is when they go through something like that, with golden hearts, their friends come over, and they clean everything up and they throw the trash away. Then when you put many things in the insurance claim without having pictures or the actual items, the insurance company says prove that you had that.
To that point, it was the engineer in me, and I had also handled big industrial disasters, when the house was destroyed the first thing I did was collect all my guns oil them, and store them in a safe place (one roll of my house was gone), but I didn’t touch anything else. The second thing I did is run temporary power to the house, I set up a computer on what was left of the dining room table, and on every single thing that was damaged or destroyed, we took pictures from a couple different angles. On the computer, I exactly duplicated the columns in the insurance claim form, and everything was entered in the computer.
A silly blessing in disguise was that I had things like salt shakers, and plastic waste cans. I never really planned on claiming any of that, but the settlement process was so abusive we actually entered all of that into work claim.
Another big thing, is if you have a claim more than about $15,000, hire an independent claim adjuster advisor to work for you. It only cost a couple thousand dollars, they know the system, and they know the people, and in our case, in the very first go round, the claims paid amount went up by 58%. We didn’t settle for that.
I mentioned, we exactly duplicated the claims columns on the computer. The form from the insurance company had space for eight items. We made claims on 1300 items. You’d be amazed what you own when you have to count at all. When you submit the claim to the insurance company they have 90 days to respond. We submitted all the correct paperwork, but we use the Excel table instead of using their eight line paper form. On the 89th day, we got a certified return receipt letter (to the wrong address) that said they could not honor the claim because it was not submitted on their form. To them, it’s a game, to you with your life and your families lives. That was the key point when we pursue legal action, and of course they settled way before it ever got to court.
The other thing I did, that I know how to do well, I got it in the newspapers, locally, across the state, and nationally. The big companies don’t like anybody who knows what they’re talking about in the media.
Blah, blah, blah, you know I can go on forever, but if ever, anybody goes through something like that reach out to me. If nobody gets hurt, the tornado or the hurricane, or whatever is peanuts, it’s in the news a couple days, but it’s over for everybody. Our claims process took three years. Compared to what they offered us upfront, the three-year process yielded about four times my annual salary was in the difference. It’s a pain in the ass but it was worth it.
Sorry, forgive me, that touched a nerve obviously
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