06
Aug

If your home insurance company requires you to do fire mitigation on your property in Colorado, give us a call at (719)400-9104.

Your home is your biggest asset, and yet a lot of people will skip over insuring it. Even when people get insurance, they assume everything is covered. However, there is a lot of fine print, and you need to make sure it’s all covered. It doesn’t matter if you rent or own.

Don’t Assume Items or Types of Disasters Are Covered

You would think that specific items in your home are covered if they’re damaged. You would think that wildfires are a covered occurrence to your home. The problem is that just because it makes sense that something is covered doesn’t mean that the companies will add them into their list. This is because companies want reasons not to pay out.

Likewise, if you’re a renter, don’t assume that your landlord has a policy that will cover your belongings. You need your own coverage, which is through a renter’s policy. You don’t need to cover the building, but you do need to cover your own belongings.

Rebuilding Costs More Than You Would Think

While you want to keep the premiums low, you don’t want to take a lower policy just to do that. You need to make sure you have all the coverage that you’ll need, and rebuilding after floods, fires, and more isn’t cheap.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve been with the same company for 20 years. The insurance company doesn’t care about loyalty; it cares about the premiums you paid. The claims adjuster is helping the company save money, not you.

In a survey of those who lost their homes in the Fourmile Canyon Fire in 2010, nearly 66% of homeowners shared that they were underinsured. This was partly due to the insurance companies using software to estimate the cost of constructing the house. The problem is they didn’t take into account the actual cost of rebuilding individual homes and use the prices for builders constructing volumes of houses at the same time—saving money on tools and items due to bulk ordering.

You’ll also need to look at the age of the home. It needs to be rebuilt using the newer housing codes, which tend to lead to a higher price tag. Make sure your coverage includes Law and Ordinance coverage to help cover the cost of building permits and code changes from over the years, otherwise you can see your costs 20% higher than expected.

Then there’s the living costs during the rebuild. You’re usually covered for a year to encourage the rebuild to happen quickly, but you may be able to negotiate two years. Make sure it’s in the contract!

Don’t Forget the Upgrades

The longer you live in a place, the more likely you are to renovate or add items. This could be a full renovation of a bathroom, or it could be adding a deck to the home. You’re following fire mitigation rules, and you get to add value to your home. Do you have the coverage, though?

Your insurer usually needs to know if the value of your home has gone up by at least $5,000 due to renovations.

Colorado Mastication offers fire mitigation, scrub oak removal, brush clearing. Contact us now for an estimate.