October 8, 2018 Survivors of Northern California wildfires are facing ‘no win’ decisions on rebuilding At a recent event for people who lost their homes in last year’s fires, a local yoga business owner led the room through a mediation exercise. She led off by sharing that her childhood home had been destroyed in the fires, and then dimmed the…
October 7, 2018 A year later, majority of North Bay fire victims still await reimbursements from home insurers to rebuild Consider the unfortunate plight of Laney Wall and Scott Rooks. They were married Sunday but remain unable to start building a new house to replace their Santa Rosa home that burned down in last October’s wildfire. The two are Air Force veterans who served in…
October 4, 2018 Hurricane Florence Aftermath: The Best Financial Options for Repairing Your Home More than two weeks after Hurricane Florence’s devastating crawl across the Carolinas and Virginia, many homeowners are assessing the damage and beginning to make repairs. According to real estate data provider CoreLogic, the storm affected 624,000 homes, the vast majority unprotected by flood insurance. Standard…
October 3, 2018 Get your papers in order Part of getting ready for a disaster means getting your financial house in order. Thousands of people who lost homes in the 2017 California wildfires discovered too late that their insurance coverage had not kept up with the rising cost of lumber, labor and other…
October 3, 2018 Trim Your Home Insurance Premium Whether you stay with your current insurer or switch, you can lower your rate without sacrificing coverage. Car insurance companies are falling all over themselves to grab your attention with clever TV ads, giving the impression that lowering your premium is as easy as picking…
October 1, 2018 Deadlines and Decisions at the One Year Anniversary: 2017 North Bay Fires This is a reminder to all households impacted by the 2017 North Bay Fires. Policies typically contain deadlines for submitting documentation of your losses and for filing a lawsuit against your insurer. You’ll most likely find language in your policies that require you to submit…
October 1, 2018 Trick or treat…what’s in yours? Make sure your policy has more treats than tricks! The only thing scarier than how devastating the last year has been with wildfires, lava, flooding and hurricanes is language we’ve been finding buried in some of the insurance policies that impacted people have been showing…
September 28, 2018 North Bay fire victims should be aware of deadlines to sue their homeowner insurers As the first anniversary of the North Bay wildfires approaches, people who lost their homes in the natural disasters should take steps to ensure they do not lose the ability to sue their homeowner insurers if they think they have been treated unfairly, according to…
September 27, 2018 Sonoma County Medical Association holds fires-recovery workshop Like anyone who has been affected by October 2017’s wildfires, physicians need ongoing support and assistance in rebuilding their lives. And they continue to receive it. On Wednesday the Sonoma County Medical Association held the third in its ongoing series of fire-recovery programs and workshops…
September 26, 2018 What’s UP? Fall 2018 BACH TALK A message from Co-Founder and Executive Director, Amy Bach Scaling UP: Extreme weather, wildfires and torrential rains are impacting a growing number of homes and businesses across our country. Collecting insurance funds for repairs and rebuilding can be very challenging. Demand for our services…
September 26, 2018 How claims SHOULD be handled Although this is an insurance company advertisement, and the policyholder is clearly reading from a script presumably written by the insurance company, it highlights how claims should be handled, and how they shouldn’t. We at UP fully recognize that catastrophe claims put strains on insurance company resources, and…
September 25, 2018 What happens when you buy a house in a disaster zone – and no one told you? In many states, laws don’t require sellers to disclose that a property is in a flood or wildfire area, leaving homeowners with unexpected damage and losses The house on Weber Hill Road is almost a year gone, but it still haunts Emilie Hayes. Thirteen years…
September 24, 2018 Guest Blog: The Supreme Court of FL Rules in Favor of Policyholder on Application of Florida’s Bad Faith Law By Molly Chafe Brockmeyer, Esq., Boyle & Leonard, P.A., Ft. Meyers, FL. UP Volunteer On September 20, 2018, in a case where UP weighed in as amicus curiae, the Supreme Court of Florida issued its opinion, affirming Florida’s long held bad faith precedent. The state’s high…
September 21, 2018 Bummer about your medical emergency, but your claim is denied because you didn’t call in advance Of the many dubious reasons insurers use for denying claims, one of the most bizarre is telling a patient they neglected to obtain prior approval for treatment in the midst of a medical emergency. Because, of course, the first thing most people think of in…
September 21, 2018 Private firefighters and five-star hotels: how the rich sit out wildfires With record-breaking wildfires carving up the American west this summer, firefighters have become the rarest of civil servants: the kind almost universally lauded as heroes. Reinforcements dropped into California’s firefight from as far away as Australia and American Samoa to bolster strained state and federal…
September 20, 2018 Footing The Bill For Climate Change: ‘By The End Of The Day, Someone Has To Pay’ By all accounts, Florence was a massive, wet monster of a storm — and an expensive one, too. Its historic deluge swelled inland rivers and wrecked homes across the Carolinas, racking up costs that early estimates set as high as $22 billion. When the floodwaters…
September 20, 2018 Carr Fire debris removal service limitations REDDING, Calif. — Debris removal from the Carr Fire is under way in Shasta County, but before the crews clear your land, there’s some last-minute information you should know. Janelle Galbraith Management Assistant to the City Manager, with the Redding city planner’s office says once…
September 19, 2018 Green Mountain Falls homes hit with mudslides, little help available Cascading hail accumulated on Lamar Mathews’ windshield as she made her way up the back road to Green Mountain Falls, through Chipita Park. She’d been stuck in traffic on U.S. 24 going west from Colorado Springs for quite some time before managing to get on…
