If you recently had a house fire, you'll be using home insurance to help pay for the damages that were caused to the structure of your home. While repairing the home itself should be straight forward, you have some options for how to handle your personal property. Consider these tips to know how you'll recover from your losses.
Let An Insurance Adjuster Handle It
You always have the option to let an insurance adjuster handle everything. They'll use information from previous claims to estimate how much personal property was in your home. For instance, when going through your kitchen, they may have an estimate for how much it costs to replace all of the spices in your spice rack.
Using an insurance adjuster can certainly save you time, but chances are that it will not cover everything that was damaged in the fire. An insurance adjuster doesn't know all the things you have, which can cause an estimate on personal property to be low.
List Items As A Family
If your home is completely gone, your best option is to sit down as a family and try to remember everything that is in each room. Start with one wall and list everything you can think of. Move on to drawers and try to list everything you think could be inside it. Keep going around the room until you feel it is complete, then move onto the next room. By working as a family, you'll be doing all you can to list the items that were lost in the fire.
Take Photos Of Damaged Items
If you can still walk through the home, but things are covered with soot or damaged, you can actually start listing things that you see. Instead of going through the home with a pad of paper and a pen, it may be better to take photos of all the damaged items. You can sort through the items later, and type them into a list of fill out the personal property loss forms immediately.
Taking photos also gives absolute proof that everything you are listing as a loss was in the home. If there is ever a question, you can dig up those photos and show them to your insurance company.
For more help dealing with homeowners insurance plans, be sure to work closely with your insurance company. They'll be able to assist you however they can to make sure the claim is done right.
