by JayDoug » Thu May 28, 2015 09:37 pm
Last year, our A/C drain backed up and the A/C leaked water which damaged several square feet of laminate flooring in two rooms. I'm a very handy guy. I resolved the cause of the A/C leak with a professional quality repair. Minor cosmetic damage to the flooring remained. My wife and I debated what to do about it, and finally ended up filing a homeowners claim. Long story short--the insurance company cut us a check for $9,000. It was a painless process--exactly the way you would expect insurance to work. I should mention that we own our home outright, so the check was made out to us directly, and we deposited it in our account.
We had every intention of having the floor replaced, but had some serious illness in the family (cancer) and, since the damage was minor and cosmetic, we just ignored the slightly warped floorboards for a few weeks while we dealt with more pressing issues. A couple months passed, and we noticed that the flooring didn't look quite as warped as it had originally. A couple more months passed, and it looked better still. We couldn't believe it, but after about 6 months, 90% of the damage had disappeared. You now have to look really hard, and at just the right angle to see where the damage was.
We filed this claim in good faith, fully believing that the flooring would need to be replaced. This is the first and only homeowners claim we have ever filed. We were not looking to take advantage of the situation, but, in the end, we came out $9,000 ahead. I added up all the premiums we have paid to the insurance company, and the $9K is only a fraction of what we have paid out, so we didn't feel guilty about keeping it at all. I figured life just throws you a bone every now and then, deposited it in savings and forgot about it.
Fast forward to last week. Out of the blue, I received an email from our agent. The insurance company is requesting photos, invoices, etc--proof of repairs. I wasn't sure exactly what to tell our agent, so I just said that the repairs had not yet been made due to a serious family illness. (We do have a family member battling cancer.) The next day, our agent forwarded a memo from the insurance company stating that our policy would be non-renewed if proof of repairs were not submitted by January 2016.
I'm not sure what to do now. The flooring is not 100% perfect, but if it had looked this good originally, we would have never filed the claim. One of the rooms involved is the kitchen. I really don't want to go through the nightmare of having a contractor tear our kitchen apart and put it back together unnecessarily just so I can collect a copy of an invoice.
I also don't want to just give the money back either. (I'm not even sure if that's possible.) The act of filing the claim has dinged our CLUE report and I'm sure we will pay more in future premiums over the next few years as a result of the claim. If nothing else, I'll end up putting the money towards the higher premiums.
If I do get dropped, what could I expect when I try to shop around for another policy? Knowing that they may drop me, am I better to shop around while I still have the policy in place? I know the fact that we filed a claim in 2014 will be common knowledge to any company we consider, but I'm not sure how much detail beyond that the CLUE report contains.
I am looking for some advice on the best course of action to take at this point...
We had every intention of having the floor replaced, but had some serious illness in the family (cancer) and, since the damage was minor and cosmetic, we just ignored the slightly warped floorboards for a few weeks while we dealt with more pressing issues. A couple months passed, and we noticed that the flooring didn't look quite as warped as it had originally. A couple more months passed, and it looked better still. We couldn't believe it, but after about 6 months, 90% of the damage had disappeared. You now have to look really hard, and at just the right angle to see where the damage was.
We filed this claim in good faith, fully believing that the flooring would need to be replaced. This is the first and only homeowners claim we have ever filed. We were not looking to take advantage of the situation, but, in the end, we came out $9,000 ahead. I added up all the premiums we have paid to the insurance company, and the $9K is only a fraction of what we have paid out, so we didn't feel guilty about keeping it at all. I figured life just throws you a bone every now and then, deposited it in savings and forgot about it.
Fast forward to last week. Out of the blue, I received an email from our agent. The insurance company is requesting photos, invoices, etc--proof of repairs. I wasn't sure exactly what to tell our agent, so I just said that the repairs had not yet been made due to a serious family illness. (We do have a family member battling cancer.) The next day, our agent forwarded a memo from the insurance company stating that our policy would be non-renewed if proof of repairs were not submitted by January 2016.
I'm not sure what to do now. The flooring is not 100% perfect, but if it had looked this good originally, we would have never filed the claim. One of the rooms involved is the kitchen. I really don't want to go through the nightmare of having a contractor tear our kitchen apart and put it back together unnecessarily just so I can collect a copy of an invoice.
I also don't want to just give the money back either. (I'm not even sure if that's possible.) The act of filing the claim has dinged our CLUE report and I'm sure we will pay more in future premiums over the next few years as a result of the claim. If nothing else, I'll end up putting the money towards the higher premiums.
If I do get dropped, what could I expect when I try to shop around for another policy? Knowing that they may drop me, am I better to shop around while I still have the policy in place? I know the fact that we filed a claim in 2014 will be common knowledge to any company we consider, but I'm not sure how much detail beyond that the CLUE report contains.
I am looking for some advice on the best course of action to take at this point...
Posted: Fri May 29, 2015 02:55 am Post Subject:
Take photos of the floor and tell them you can't find the receipt... or you may not have kept it. Or you could tell them that you repaired it yourself and just send the photos. The reason they should be asking for this info is to make sure they are insuring a home in good condition. They don't want to keep paying for a damaged floor (future claims) if the floor was never repaired. If you can show them that its "repaired" (all better) then they might just stop the non-renewal.
I can saw if they found out you never had it repaired and it did not need to be repaired that they would probably ask for the money back. It's fraud to keep it. But a lot of people do this, it happens all of the time. Just like you are not supposed to cheat on your taxes.... but 99.99999999999% of people do.
Posted: Wed Jun 03, 2015 11:50 am Post Subject:
We were not looking to take advantage of the situation, but, in the end, we came out $9,000 ahead.
If your claim was filed in good faith, there is no problem with this. Makes no difference how much you paid in past premiums -- you pay for insurance one year at a time and you either have claims during that year or you do not. You don't build up "cash value" in homeowners insurance like you might in some life insurance policies. What you paid in premiums two or three or ten years ago is completely water under the bridge, and cannot influence the outcome of a claim.Out of the blue, I received an email from our agent. The insurance company is requesting photos, invoices, etc--proof of repairs.
If the insurance company did not request this prior to paying the claim, they cannot require it now. State insurance laws require the company to "adopt and implement" claims-related investigation procedures, which they apparently did not follow. You did not ask for reimbursement beyond the "actual cash value" of your loss, so whether you use the money to repair/replace the damaged floor is up to you.our agent forwarded a memo from the insurance company stating that our policy would be non-renewed if proof of repairs were not submitted by January 2016.
Sounds a little drastic, but the insurance company does not have to give you a reason for nonrenewal -- it just cannot discriminate against you for basic reasons (race, religion, national origin, etc). They could just as easily hand you a notice that says, "If you fail to make repairs to the section of flooring for which we have issued payment, we will not pay a subsequent claim for damage to the same flooring." They obviously don't want your business, so you obviously don't want to do business with them either. Go shopping for a new insurance company ASAP. You don't have to wait until January 2016 to change companies.tcope wrote
It's fraud to keep it.
I disagree. Fraud is a crime of intent. If you suffer an insurance-covered loss which is not caused by you intentionally, you are not committing insurance fraud by submitting a claim, receiving a payment, and not making the repairs. Both of us have made that statement numerous times in the auto insurance forum. Nothing is different in homeowners insurance -- it's all property and casualty insurance.What would be fraudulent is not making the repairs and later making a second claim for the same damage on another occasion to the same or a different insurance company. That doesn't happen too often in homeowners insurance, but it is a common problem in auto insurance.
I'm not sure what to do now. The flooring is not 100% perfect, but if it had looked this good originally, we would have never filed the claim.
Doesn't matter. You could not have known that the "appearance" would restore itself with time. In the future, armed with this knowledge, your response/reaction might be different. But you could run into problems filing a claim for damage six months after the loss, too.You generally want to "report" a covered loss to your insurance company IMMEDIATELY. It is your choice to make a claim for the damage now or later. You can always say to the insurance company, "You know, this happened once before, and about 6 months later, we hardly noticed the damage. We'd like to see if that happens again and wait before we make a claim." As long as they are on notice of the loss, they are less likely to be uncooperative in the future. They would probably ask you (or send someone) to take photos of the damage as it currently exists to document the loss.
The act of filing the claim has dinged our CLUE report and I'm sure we will pay more in future premiums over the next few years as a result of the claim.
Higher premiums may or may not result. You won't know until you go shopping for new coverage. A single claim in a period of more than 5 years of continuous coverage should not be a problem.Knowing that they may drop me, am I better to shop around while I still have the policy in place?
This is the ONLY way to properly change insurance carriers. Whether you are being threatened with nonrenewal or not. In filling out an application for new insurance, you can answer NO to the question, "Have you ever been cancelled or nonrenewed by a prior insurance company?" and NO to the question, "Have you experienced any periods during which your property was not continuously insured?" I have never seen any question that asks, "Are you changing insurance companies because your existing insurance company is not going to renew your coverage when it expires?"My advice: keep the money, sleep well at night, and find a new insurance company that will provide equivalent or better coverage at a price you are reasonably happy to pay. You have plenty of choices, and you probably need a new agent to help you find them.
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