3 Crucial Tips When Making A House Fire Insurance Claim

From the decades of outfits in your wardrobe to the cleaning chemicals under your kitchen sink. It’s practically impossible to recollect every item that’s in your home at all times.

If you were to ever lose your home in a fire accident, your insurance is there for you to replace these items.

But do they really have your best interest in mind?

Insurance companies employ teams of ‘adjusters’ who will take the claim you provided and give the lowest value they can possibly justify for every item in your home.

That ‘microwave’ that you wrote down is now going to be replaced with a cheap $39.99 microwave from Wal-mart instead of the $399 intelligent talking microwave you had.

Keep documentation of everything

Keeping updated video and photo documentation is crucial to ensure you get the most value from your insurance claim. The more detail the better.

Walk through your entire house, including the garage and outside. This documentation can later be used when claiming specific items. We recommend doing a fresh walk through every 6 months or so.

Don’t just take these videos on your phone and forget about it. Store the footage in a safe place such as online. You want access even if you lose the device you recorded it on.

Popular places to upload your videos are with cloud services such as Apple’s iCloud, Google’s Drive or Dropbox. These solutions all have free storage options up to a certain file size.

File your claim with as much detail as possible

List every item on your claim in as much detail as possible.

Brand names, important product features, store it was purchased from, model number if possible. If you can provide a purchase receipt or transaction history, even better.

Here are a few examples of what you could expect:

• If you said “microwave - $50”, they could be within -20%. They will find something that is $40.
• If you said “microwave - $500”, you would need more info to justify the price.
• If you said “microwave - Walmart”, you’re getting the cheapest one there.
• If you said “microwave - Macys”, you’ll likely get a higher priced one.
• If you said “microwave” and your other kitchen appliances were Jenn Air / Kitchenmaid / etc., you would likely get a matching one.
• If you said “Hamilton Beach 1.1 CuFt. 1000 W Mid Size Microwave Oven - $86”, you just got yourself $86.
• If you said “High-end microwave, stainless steel, glowing buttons, smart device”, you would get a higher value than just ‘microwave’ as they have to match all features listed. 

Not all insurance companies work the same and you would have to review your own policy, but chances are the more documentation you have, the more you’ll get back.

Use professional services to protect you from insurance companies

Hire your own fire claims adjuster who provides their expert knowledge to guide you. They have templates for many scenarios and can oftentimes come up with items that you would have never thought to add to your claim, saving you big money in the end.

Fire claims adjusters can assist in many areas including:

• Damage appraisal
• Inventory preparing
• Property estimation
• Interpreting your insurance policy
• Drafting your claims
• Negotiating with your insurance company

In the event that you ever need a fire claims adjuster, a few simple Google searches should provide plenty of local professionals available to help you.

TLDR: Insurance companies will protect their assets rather than yours. Keep updated video documentation of every room in the house. Write down each item in as much detail as possible on your claim. Hire a professional adjuster to negotiate on your behalf.

Follow these tips and you'll be sure to get the best claim possible.

We hope this never happens to you or your loved ones, but it’s always best to stay informed and be as prepared as possible.

We’ll leave you with this comment by a past claims adjuster who worked for a big insurance company:

“Sometimes people would come back to us with "updated* claims. They tried it on their own, and listed stuff like "toaster", "microwave", "tv" .. and weren't happy with what they got back. So they hired a fire-truck chaser, and re-submitted with "more information." I have absolutely seen claims go from under $7k calculated, to over $100k calculated. (It's amazing what can happen when people suddenly "remember" their entire wardrobe came from Nordstrom.)”