01/16/2025
Some good tips from a friend…
TO EVERYONE WHO LOST THEIR HOME IN THE LA/SO CAL FIRES
* Also make sure your contractor is licensed...
If you’ve been affected by the wildfires in Southern California, our hearts are with you. ❤️
Based on our personal experience in losing our home & everything we owned in October 2017 in the Sonoma County Tubs firestorm, we have compiled some of the top priorities & successful actions we'd recommend putting your attention on and getting into action as soon as possible.
NOTE: It's important to keep your basics in as a priority: sleep, vitamins, fluids, a safe, calming space to sleep/temporarily live.
YOUR MORTGAGE:
#1. If you plan to rebuild, we highly recommend NOT paying off your mortgage through your insurance payout (as this will give you that much more money to rebuild, and, you likely will have a much better rate than what you can get on a construction loan). BE SURE TO NOTIFY YOUR INSURANCE THAT YOU DO NOT WANT THE MORTGAGE PAID OFF, OTHERWISE THEY MAY AUTOMATICALLY DO SO.
GETTING A CONTRACTOR NAILED DOWN:
. As there will inevitably be many others looking to rebuild, you want to use your contacts to find a licensed Contractor ASAP - and find out what is required to get in contract with them (meet with them, ask them for a contract, give them some form of deposit, etc.).
. Be sure to ask your Contractor, before going into contract:
- what experience they have in rebuilding. Ideally you get a Contractor that is a known quantity. In the 2017 fires/rebuild there were a lot of "pop up" contractors that didn't really know what they were doing, took a lot of money from others wanting to rebuild and were not able to perform resulting in a lot of lost insurance rebuild funds.
- if they have the team, subcontractors, and/or connections into the city or county to also access/get all the permits for your property rebuild.
- if they have an architect and a space plans designer to get your house rebuild designed.
GETTING INSURANCE PAY OUT:
. Call your insurance carrier as soon as possible to ask them what is required for you to do an insurance claim for the loss of your house (or whatever it is that was destroyed/lost). Be sure to know what your insurance covered - personal property coverage, structure/building/property insurance, code upgrades coverage, landscape insurance, other structures insurance, etc.). Get a copy of your FULL policy and read it. It is long and boring and has misunderstoods, so have a dictionary handy. Knowing to what extent your insurance coverage is, is important as you will be sent payout proposals from your insurance carrier and knowing how much less than what you can/should be paid is vital to knowing how much more work you will put into getting them to provide more of the insurance funds.
. There are three main ways you will get an insurance payout.
a) the insurance company will provide you with their payout proposal, this is usually on the lower end of what you can get from your insurance but it will require the least amount of work on your part.
b) hire a public insurance adjuster, they will assist you in getting all of the information together and negotiate with your insurance company on your behalf. You will still have to put in work, but not as much if you do it yourself. The public adjuster will get a percentage of the insurance funds they get for you. If they do not get more than the insurance company is offering, you will net less. Most times they will get more and you will end up netting more than the insurance company's offer. More work, more funds to rebuild, paying someone to do it for you.
c) Do the work yourself and submit everything needed to maximize your insurance claim, and get the most amount of cash for your rebuild. This is the most work, but you will net the most.
. If you choose "b" or "c" to take advantage of every dollar of your insurance coverage possible, there were some things we found helpful:
- We spent countless hours compiling an excel of every single item in our house that could be covered through insurance for the personal contents section of our insurance. We worked hard to go well over the limit of our insurance coverage as we found that insurance would devalue items due to age.
This excel is very long, it contains EVERY item that we had in our house, from the salt on the kitchen counter, to the bed in our room, to the rubber bands in the kitchen junk drawer: EVERY SINGLE item. (We can provide you with a copy of the Excel we created for our house if you'd like! You can use it to help remind you of what you had, add items, remove items, etc.)
. Insurance checks will be made out to both the homeowner(s) and the Lender(s). Find out how to contact your Lenders or their representative any time you get an insurance check payout. You will have to sign the check and then deliver it to your Lender. The Lender will endorse the check and deposit it into an Escrow account held specifically for your property rebuild, or loan payoff.
When working with your Lender to get payments for your rebuild there will be limits the Lender will allow on disbursements. If the amounts are too small for your rebuild requirements, based on the contract with the General Contractor hired for the rebuild, you may have to go up higher on the command chain with the Lender's emergency/disaster department (there usually always is one with the big lenders). This will take intention, persistence, remaining positive, and follow up regularly with the contacts you discover & connect up with. Finding a manager that can help, can make this a much smoother process when you are ready for rebuilding.
PROPERTY CLEAN UP:
#4. The decision to have your property cleaned by FEMA or a private contractor is one you want to review/consider. There should be an online site that provides the FEMA estimate of time for them to get to your property. Based on that time frame you would want to make a decision if you should go private and get your property cleaned & ready for rebuild or wait for FEMA.
You might find you are racing against time, because of the others who will want to rebuild. Also, FEMA isn't always free, meaning they can send a bill that you or your insurance will need to cover down the road. (We found their cost would have been much less than going private, but they were MONTHS out and would have put us months behind others who were rebuilding and would have considerably slowed us down and increased building material costs as a result).
So gather the data and make your decision based on your overall desired plan. (We opted with a private clean and our insurance had coverage for "lot clean" up.)
BUILD EFFICIENCY:
#5. Unless you are a designer or have built homes or remodeled homes before, you may want to ask your Contractor if they have a design consultant or find a designer who can A) consult, or B)help design your rebuild.
We found getting a design consultant saved us ssooo many hours and ssoooo much overwhelm with the thousands of decisions we had to make when designing our new home. (As a suggestion, Pinterest is a great platform for ideas! Also watching HGTV home modeling TV shows was helpful; we'd watch as we ate dinner)
TAKING CARE OF YOURSELF:
Do not forget to focus on yourself and your spiritual well-being in such a situation. This is vital!
We hope the above is helpful in getting you onto the path of creating and building a bigger, better, stronger future!
🏠Remember that you’re not alone—there’s a community ready to support you.
Share this with anyone who might need it.
