When our house in the Bay Area burned down in 2008, I learned a lot.
1. Hire a Public Adjustor. Much less expensive than a lawyer and will produce the same or better result. Our initial insurance company offer was $100k. Public Adjustor and I worked closely together and the final settlement was over the policy limits, more than $550k. He charged 6%. A lawyer will want 33 to 40%,.
2. Go ahead and sign up for the public clean-up. If they do it, they can’t gripe about how it got done. Exclude that cost from the Public Adjustor contract. Other than what others have said, there is another reason. The rainy season will start soon, and wet charred debris grows mold. A lot of this can not be taken to the normal dump, due to “mold hysteria”. Very expensive to dispose. If you do this disposal yourself and mold grows due to their delay in issuing a permit, that is tough luck for you. If you sign the money over to them and they don’t do it before it molds, that is on them. They will probably give themselves a waiver, which they will never do for you.
If you don’t they will torment you at every turn. Huge fines for overweight trucks, and only work certain hours, etc. Essentially, you will become responsible for the cost overrun for clean up of the entire county. And, they will charge you and fine you until you pay up.
3. Keep track of everything. Every scrap of paper, everything. I got some file folder labels that would fit in my printer and printed them with page numbers. I stuck a page number on every single piece of paper, so that when I copied them each page had a unique number. I think it ended up with over 500 pages, but I could periodically copy the file and send it to insurance, building dept, Public Adjustor, etc,. and we could refer to a specific page with no ambiguity. (The bid on pages 145 and 146, instead of the “fourth repaving bid”.)
4. I kept a “master copy — a first generation copy of all the originals as well as the originals. The master copy could feed through the document feeder at a copy center, which made supplying everyone who asked with all of the information a fast & easy job. This greatly disappointed the government checkers and the insurance company chiselers who count on you not having the records to prove what really happened.
4. Invest in a scanner. You will want to keep electronic files of everything also.
5. You may need a fax machine. Back then my insurance company would not use email, I don’t know if that has changed. I suspect the reason was to prevent me, or anyone else from keeping an easily searchable record of what they said, so everything had to be done by fax or snail mail.
I sent them a fax nearly every day and state regulations were that they had to respond in 48 hours. I kept them on the run. And since I had scanned copies of their responses, I could easily quote their past responses when they tried to reneg on paying for items they had agreed to.
Excellent lessons learned there, CD. Thanks for sharing all that.
I’ve learned on virtually EVERY transaction with a company to immediately start a telecon log file where I document everything said, name of who was on the call, date and time. I use a telephone headset so I have both hands to type the information directly into a Word document for every conversation. I name the individual files with the company, subject, and date of conversation. Companies these days hand you off to so many different people and they may or may not have been brought up to speed by the notes that they keep.
I had not heard about a “Public Adjustor” before. What is that? Was your policy capped at the $100k that the insurance company offered you? I’m astonished you got a settlement over 5X their initial offer. Also astonished at the difference in cut to the Public Adjustor vs. a lawyer.
Your recommendation for a scanner is spot-on. I bought an Epson Perfection V600 Photo Scanner probably 7 or 8 years ago and we use it all the time for scanning legal and business documents as well as family photos. I’m amazed how much we use it and the quality scans it puts out. The Epson scanning software is really poor; instead get the VueScan software from Hamrick Software. I think the company is run by the lone guy who wrote it and he is updating it all the time. I made a one-time $90 payment and have been getting his upgrades forever. It is rock solid. It also allows you to create single- or multi-page pdf documents straight from the scanning software. The files will be big, but you can use something like Apple Preview to shrink them 90%
Very interesting remarks about the mold issue and the issues of dumping moldy debris.
I like your idea of putting unique page numbers onto every single document. That’s brilliant.