A fire on your property – regardless of how minor or how contained the blaze may have been – is almost always going to result in devastation, destroying a fair share of your possessions and a good chunk of your property along the way.

Fire damage is one of the most common types of claims made to insurance companies each year, ranking just behind water damage. Both of these kinds of situations can cause thousands of dollars (and a whole lot more, too) in damage faster than you would have expected or anticipated, all while consuming and destroying key parts of your home and possessions that may not be able to be replaced.

The destructive nature of fire damage also makes it quite challenging to come up with an accurate reporting of the extent and nature of the destruction. Some of your possessions and some of your property may quite literally be to ashes, leaving nothing behind to signify what they were in the past – or what they were worth.

This makes the claims process of an insurance company quite challenging, compelling you to do everything you can to make sure that the damage is fully documented, that your insurance company is cutting corners or cutting costs by lowering your payout, and that you are getting multiple estimates (outside estimates) for repairs to guarantee that everything about this process is on the up and up.

Tips for getting your fire insurance claim moving along

Right out of the gate, you’re going to want to move quickly documenting all of the damage that has occurred because of the fire with pictures and video if possible, providing your insurance company with as much “hard evidence” as you are able to an effort to move your fire insurance claim along.

On top of that, you’re also going to want to make sure that you are reaching out to professional public claims adjusters that can help you navigate the insurance claim process, that are able to decipher every detail of your insurance contract, and are able to hold your insurance company responsible when they inevitably try to lowball your settlement or negotiate to provide a lower payment than your contract stipulates they do.

You’ll want to create a list of everything that was lost to the fire, research the value of those items as in-depth as possible, and provide a copy of that list to your insurance company and your professional public claims adjuster (like the ones that we are able to furnish you). This will speed the process up as well, particularly if your claims adjuster is reaching out to your insurance company on a regular basis and encouraging the process to move along just as quickly as it can.

As highlighted above, anytime fire destroys part of your structure you’ll want to have multiple estimates for the work that needs to be done to safely rebuild and reconstruct your structure – ideally from outside services and not just the ones that your insurance company recommends.

Your public adjuster can help you in this area as well, guaranteeing that you always receive an insurance payment that covers all of the work that needs to be done and all of the possessions that were lost while never getting paid unless (and until) you do.