Filing an Insurance Claim

Our insurance company escaped paying for new gutters in the back of the house when ice brought them down. They also saved money when our copper gutter was smashed by a tree. The logic has always been that we'd keep a very high deductible and only use the insurance when we had a large loss. That way we can keep our rates as low as possible. In our (double digit!) years of renting and owning, we have never filed a claim.

Thanks to our recent house robbery, we broke our streak.  My initial instinct, as usual, was to not file a claim because the computers that were taken were rather old and their market value wasn't substantially higher than our (high) deductible. Then I realized we are paying an extra $100/year for actual value replacement. In other words, if a five year old laptop got stolen, we would get reimbursed for the closest brand new equivalent. Also, the stolen bike backpack had a surprisingly valuable amount of biking-related items inside.

So we filed. While it took nearly a month for the claim to be (mostly) settled, we got a fair outcome from our insurance company. Two things really helped our claim:

1. A police report that listed the items stolen
2. Proof of ownership of the stolen items

It really helped that we took pictures of our electronics and because we are heavy internet shoppers, receipts could be retrieved for many of the stolen items. In general if we had a receipt or photograph of the item, we got reimbursed. The overall process was fairly straightforward:

1. Tell insurance we were robbed and give them the police report number;
2. Fill out a lengthly report detailing exactly what happened to our house, what was stolen, when we bought and how much we paid for the stolen goods, and document any home security updates we had to do to re-secure the house - including having to buy new locks;
3. Wait for claim resolution.

I was hoping we would get the full reimbursement value for everything up front, but what the insurance company did was give us the current value. Which is is calculated from today's retail price minus depreciation. So, for example our PS3, which cost us $350 years ago, currently sells for $250. Because video game consoles have a steep depreciation we got reimbursed about ~$70. So when we buy a replacement and submit the receipt we can get the $180 extra. That was a unique case, though, because PS3s are still available and cheaper than when we bought ours.

We made out better on the laptops, because the models that were available years ago are no longer available, so we essentially got a free upgrade in the process. As long as we bought something similar (i.e. brand, same hard drive capacity, similar performance, etc.), they paid the whole amount back to us, eventually.

The initially approved amount got transferred into our bank via a online transfer. As we submit receipts for replacement items we will get the remaining money we are owed. Given that we have heard so many horror stories about insurance reimbursement, we are pleasantly surprised at the result. I assume having receipts and photos of our most valuable items is crucial to getting a fair reimbursement. For the future we need to keep documenting our valuable items with videos and photos.