3 Best Kept Secrets About Home Insurance Claims

You are a home owner. You insured your home properly and paid premiums on time. Probably you never filed a claim before. Now something happens and you need to file a claim. Here is what nobody told you:

The moment you talk to your insurance company about the damage you will have a claim on record. Even if you don’t formally file a claim and even if you never got paid any money.

You are not required to report all damages to the insurance. Before you call the insurance company, get a preliminary estimate of the repair cost. Call the insurance claims center only if the repair estimate is large enough to justify filing a claim.

Insurance company makes a settlement offer that will have many assumptions about the type of repair, quality of replacements and prices in local market. They would like to you to take the offer and quietly go away.

You can easily check whether your claim settlement is correct very easily. You can find claim estimation tools on web. Fill up a few details and find out for your self in couple of minutes. Your state may allow up to 6 years for you to ask the insurance company for additional money.

Claim information will then be sent into CLUE database and will be shared with all insurance companies. This will be used for many years to set your insurance rates and when somebody else buys your home.

You have a right to request a free report from CLUE database. Unfortunately the process is not very easy. Request a copy of your C.L.U.E. report from C.L.U.E. Inc. Consumer Disclosure Center, P.O. Box 105295, Atlanta, Georgia 30348-5295, or call toll free 1-866-312-8076. Report all errors like an invalid claim report or an incorrect loss payment to ChoicePoint. Make sure it is correct.

Please visit for additional information.