Homeowners Claims
Property claims generate more disputes than any other line. These cover the recurring fights — roofs, water, contents, living expenses and matching.
When Insurance Will Not Pay for Roof Damage
When an insurer will not pay for roof damage, the reason is rarely that it disputes the damage exists. Roofs generate more property-claim disputes than any other part of a house, because the same damage can honestly be described in more than one way — and one of those descriptions is not covered.
Read more →When Insurance Denies a Water Damage Claim
A denied water damage claim usually turns on what kind of water it was. Water is the most litigated cause of loss in property insurance, because policies treat different kinds of water very differently — and the difference between them is frequently a matter of interpretation rather than fact.
Read more →When Insurance Will Not Pay for Somewhere Else to Live
If your home cannot be lived in and the insurer is refusing to pay for a hotel or a rental, the coverage you are looking for has a name: additional living expenses. When a home cannot be lived in, most policies pay the extra cost of living elsewhere. It is also one of the coverages people most often underclaim, because nobody explains what it includes.
Read more →Contents Claims and the Inventory You Do Not Have
Contents claims ask you to list and value everything you owned, usually right after losing it. The process favors the insurer by design, and knowing how it works is most of the battle.
Read more →When Insurance Will Only Pay for Part of the Roof
Being told that insurance will only pay for the damaged section — leaving you with a roof or a wall that does not match — is one of the most common property disputes there is. Damage rarely respects the boundaries of a material. When part of a roof, a run of siding or a stretch of flooring is destroyed and the replacement will not match what survived, the question of who pays for the difference is a genuine and recurring dispute.
Read more →When Insurance Will Not Cover Mold
Mold is one of the most heavily restricted items in a property policy, and a mold denial is rarely really about the mold. It is about the water that produced it, and about a limit that sits apart from the rest of your coverage.
Read more →Looking for the law in your state?
These describe how each denial works, which is much the same everywhere. What you can do about one is not — choose the state where your policy was issued.