Are you properly insured?

Disasters have covered the front pages of the newspapers this year. Unfortunately, based on projections from a variety of sources, they will continue to command our attention in 2009.

Are you properly insured? Do you have the documentation that you’ll need? This story clearly explains why everyone should be prepared.

A friend called to tell me that her parents’ home was broken into. They had helped her move, and when they returned home, found that their back garage door had been kicked in, in broad daylight and in a condominium community. Upon discovering this, her mother’s first thought was “this is going to be a real big hassle trying to discover what has been taken.”

Since they had been burglarized before, they were aware of the difficulty remembering and proving everything they own(ed). At that time, they spent hours on end trying to figure out what was missing. Unfortunately, they never did replace everything that was stolen. This was because they forgot about items rarely used, and didn’t discover the loss until after the settlement when they went looking for something and couldn’t find it.

After the initial shock of this incident, though, her mother remembered that they had just a few months earlier hired us to document a personal property inventory. Fortunately, nothing was missing because their dog scared off the intruders before they got into the house. But, with only 5 days until Christmas, the story could have been much different.