I'm a long time lurker, not a big poster so bear with me.
Earlier this week, our house was struck by lightning during a crazy storm. Luckily, it didn't suffer from any cosmetic damage (still trying to figure that out). We did discover a good deal of things that were blown out, not working. After the storm passed, we collected ourselves and looked over our home owners policy. We discovered that our deductible was pretty high, $1,500 and being fairly new/young homeowners we had no idea what it would cost to fix things. There's no way it could cost over $1,500 to fix our home right? Nevertheless, we followed instructions and notified our insurance. The next day we discovered some major components were not working properly. We needed them repaired immediately to be able to live in the house.
Now also not having experience with insurance, I thought oh well if it's higher we just pay the deductible and they pay the rest. Well we got the first estimate, then the second and so on, they all required a fee for their visits. We had to get approval, then get the work done. The cost easily surpasses our deductible.
This has been an incredible learning experience for us and eye opening for me. I've always been one to fly by the seat of my pants. Never having more than 1-2,000 in my account. My husband is the complete opposite, he's been a saver since he was a child. I am so grateful that he set aside an emergency fund so that everything could be fixed rather quickly, even as new problems arise. We also converted every receipt into a PDF which has made sharing and sending information to our insurance company a breeze.
So thank you Personal Finance, I am now a believer and hopefully I can change my ways. Also, thank you to my wonderful husband (also a lurker, he knows my usn but I don't know his lol), this could've been substantially more stressful without your having the ability to plan for the future and these bumps in the road.
Submitted August 18, 2017 at 03:14PM by loveofstones http://ift.tt/2v8MnSO
