Deductible…Scha-schmuctible

Have I ever mentioned that insurance sucks?!? Oh, yes I have…right here…last year when we had the terrible misfortune of having our house struck by lightning damaging 2 a/c’s, a heater (that we didn’t know of until Winter), a flat screen tv, and miscellaneous other electronics that added up to $100 less than our deductible, naturally.

Unfortunately, we are once again in the insurance claim saga. We were hit by the tornados that came through last Thursday night and had significant damage to our roof, our fence and a few trees. The good news is we will definitely hit our deductible, thus insurance will have to pay out SOMETHING. The bad news is that our deductible is thirty four hundred dollars….THIRTY FOUR HUNDRED FREAKING DOLLARS! Two days before the storm hit, our policy was renewed and our “replacement cost of our house” was increased by 7%...thus increasing our deductible by $200. It is a scam the insurance agencies are playing these days where they increase the “replacement cost” of the house by 7-10% a year with no direct correlation to the true value of our home. At this point, we estimate that the replacement cost and the market value of our house is off by about $100K….amounting to $1K more in deductible.

I’ll quit my pity party for now, but tune in for more rants, including but not limited to…an insurance adjuster who doesn’t answer her phone, an insurance adjuster who doesn’t even bring a ladder to evaluate the damage, and the fact that we are too cheap to temporarily fix the roof to prevent leaking.

On the humorous side, the storm came through on trash day. As you can imagine, this meant that every trash can on the street was blown over and in many cases trash was littered throughout the streets. It would be one thing if it was our trash in our yard. But it wasn't. Instead, it was one of our neighbors, who had apparenetly just cleaned out her underwear drawer. As Jeff was cleaning up the aftermath, he found six bras scattered throughout our front yard, which begs the question…what are our neighbors up to? and more importantly, who has six extra bras to throw away?

In all seriousness, we are very thankful that we were all safe. Davis might be traumatized for a bit. Jeff was still asleep when the storm came through. He was delirious when he leapt out of bed, ran upstairs and grabbed Davis, then ran downstairs while shouting at the top of his lungs WAKE UP! WAKE UP! WAKE UP! WAKE UP! the whole time. By the time, we both reunited in the pantry with the kids, Davis was literally shaking from head to toe. It was nothing a few chocolate donuts couldn’t cure as we waited out the storm.