How Long Does My California Home Insurance Company Have to Pay My Insurance Claim?

How Long Does My California Home Insurance Company Have to Pay My Insurance Claim?

It doesn’t take long to be disillusioned when your home insurance company is taking forever. Here’s what you can do if they’re dragging their feet on your claim.

When your home’s been damaged the process of waiting for a claim to be filed and work to begin on your pride and joy can feel like forever-particularly when you’ve got a hole in your roof! Most California home insurance companies are good about getting an insurance agent on the site no more than 48 hours after the incident, but not everyone is that diligent. This kind of procrastination can leave homeowners feeling frustrated and trapped, wondering if they have any legal recourse to light a fire under their insurer’s chair seat (since doing with ordinary matches almost never ends well) to make them come out and take care of the problem.

The good news is, there is! The bad news is, if your California home insurance company is taking forever to get around to paying your claim you’re going to have to do a little homework before you can set the hammers of justice swinging! Before you even bother trying to do more than pick up the phone and complain to your insurance agent, take a few minutes to read over your insurance policy. You should have received a hard copy when you signed, and hopefully you found a safe place in your house to store it where it would be readily accessible from that point on.

Your insurance company should be able to furnish you with a copy of your insurance policy if you can’t find the originals. Hey, everyone’s bad with paperwork sometimes. It seems like you have to cut down an entire tree to get anyone done these days! Before you take your new policy home, however, take some time to swing by Wally World and pick up a cheap filing cabinet. (I like the ones with the hanging folders myself.) You can pick up a decent one for under $200, and you’ll never have to worry about losing paperwork again!

Once you have a copy of your insurance policy you’re looking for two things:

1) How long your insurance company promised to take to deal with your claims. Believe it or not, that information should be in there. It’s a standard part of most insurance policies, and if your insurer has already promised to deal with your claims in a timely manner it can save you a lot of hassle in court. Your lawyer can threaten them with a breach of contract (or something similar-not being a lawyer myself I really don’t know all the specifics) and they should be more than happy to deal with your claim rather than deal with a lawsuit.

2) Whether or not your claim is covered. It’s probably unintentional, but it often seems like it takes insurance companies forever to get around to letting clients know that their insurance claims aren’t covered under the particular terms of their California home insurance policy. If you know ahead of time that they’re going to deny your claim you can save yourself a lot of trouble in the long run.

If you’re absolutely positive that your insurance company is falling down on the job you can retain the services of an attorney and let him (or her) take care of providing the matches. They’ve had years of experience being firebugs in these types of cases, and it shouldn’t take long before your California home insurance company decides that ignoring your claim is more trouble than it’s worth!

Online Cars Insurance Quote

Get a Full Coverage Auto Insurance