has anyone ever had a house fire? How does the insurance handle this?
December 24th, 2010
Question by me: has anyone ever had a house fire? How does the insurance handle this?
Does the insurance hand you a check for all your personal belongings??? Say you have your house insured for 190,000.00 and personal property for 110,000.00? I know they won’t hand you the check for your house but what about your personal belongings?
Best answer:
Answer by lucy
i had a house fire in 1995; the entire house had smoke damage and was taken down to nothing in the inside; so we had the outside frame and no drywall, appliances etc;
a restoration company came in and removed everything; they took to a special place where they tried to get the smoke out; they were able to get maybe 10% of it saved;
the repairs, construction was done by a contractor inside; floors, carpeting, woodwook etc;
the applicances, furniture we bought and then submitted claim forms for reimbursement; depending on type of policy, if you have replacement cost, they will reimburse; but you have to replace with like kind; in other words, you cant buy a high end dishwasher when you only had a basic low cost one before, or they can deduct out the difference; now there are some things that change for the better and are cheaper;
ie; dvd player; if you bought one say 5 years ago, it might have cost $ 500; today you can buy for less than $ 100 with 2 to 3 times more options;
if you had 3 tvs, you are entited to 3 new tvs; but you got to remember, they have your stuff if not completely destroyed, so they know if you are trying to get more than you had before; if it was destroyed, you might have to verify thu photos that you had something to be entitled for the replacement; also, on couple of small bedroom tvs, they only gave us 10% replacement, stated they were over 10 years old, so we werent entitled to new replacement prices, but only acv (actual cash value)
as for clothing; i lost about 90% due to smoke damage; i had to try and remember how many suits, shirts, shoes etc i had; they probably only paid about 10% of the original value i paid; that hurt the most; other things to consider is food, may only give minimum for frozen and try and calculate how much food you have in your pantry or shelfs;
you also have a deductible on your policy that they will subtract out; it is doubtful you will have $ 110K in personal property, but more likely $ 20K to $ 50K;
hopefully you have a couple of good credit cards with no balance on them; the receipts will be needed to get a reimbursement check from the insurer; it also buys time to pay the bill, since most likely will take from 2 wks to a month for each claim you submit; by the time we were dont, we probably filled out about 50 pages listing items to be reimbursed;
by the time it was all done, i suppose we were out almost $ 5k for out of pocket expenses either not covered or reduced;
i am not sure if you had a fire allready or just wondering what would happend if you did;
if you did; before buying anything, check with your insurance adjuster for the procedures on submitting claims;
also; they did pay for 3 months for us to live in an apartment since our house was unlivable;
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