Before fire, the two couples and the houses they loved were almost identical.
The Ackermans and the Spaldings bought their homes, a few hundred feet away, framed by windows that face dramatic views of the rocky mountains, 15 years ago.
Both houses in Louisville, Colorado, were spacious, each with three floors, four rooms and a finished basement. And couples grew to their families to fill them, welcoming their first sons, daughters who later served in the same Girl Scouts troop, around the moment they moved. Two years later, each couple welcomed a second son, another daughter of the Ackermans and a son for Spaldings.
On December 30, 2021, while the smoke descended on the dead ends dotted with Arces, families escaped from a forest fire that destroyed more than 1,000 structures. Both couples returned the next day to discover that their subdivision had been erased, the destruction so complete that they had to trust the street signs and the carbonized trees to identify the plots where their homes were once.
Each family Soon he contacted his insurers to start rebuilding their lives. And that was when his paths diverged, sharply.
The Spaldings received a check for $ 311,810 of their insurance Safeco in seven weeks to cover the lost belongings in the fire, after little more than a telephone interview with the adjuster. More than a year later, State Farm, the Ackerman insurer, offered only $ 131,275 to cover its contents, And only after The couple produced an exhaustive Excel spreadsheet of 50 pages that includes items as small as the Lego Set and Barbie Dolls that their daughters had lost.
Although the Ackermans finally received more than $ 850,000, the money was paid in drops and monotonians, after a fight of years, and was much lower than the $ 1.1 million they spent to rebuild. Last year they sued State Farm arguing that the insurer acted in bad faith and intentionally delayed her claim. The demand is still pending.
“If you are standing in our fate and there is literally nothing here, just pay politics. Because? Why drag it for years? Lara Ackerman said, 48, administrator of the University of Colorado.
The contrasting experiences of the neighbors with their insurers offer a window to an industry in crisis. As climate change has fed an increasing number of natural disasters, the center of attention is in the onerous requirements that delay or deny the claims of the insured.
Tens of thousands of more people are now dating through processes that were ever isolated to the single neighbor on the street or the unnamed residents of a small town ruined by a flood. In Los Angeles, where more than 16,000 houses and structures were destroyed in January, insurance companies have already paid $ 6.9 billion in claims, according to a tracker of the California insurance department. That figure is just a small part of the estimates of $ 35 to $ 45 billion in total secured losses, according to the Corelogic data firm.
In 2021, Louisville, Colorado, who is northwest of Denver, was decimated by the Marshall fire – The winds of 115 miles per hour pushed hell through a highway, which resulted in losses of $ 1 billion.
Up to two thirds of households had insufficient insurance, according to a report of the Colorado Insurance Division, which means that even if insurance companies had paid the total coverage limit, many would have had problems reconstructing.
“A lunar landscape” and milk
When the ackermans and the Spaldings returned to their subdivision where the streets curve as commas, they saw nothing more than destruction.
“A lunar landscape,” said Ackerman, describing how he had to count the lots from the corner to recognize which one belonged to his family.
“Like the surface of the moon,” said Jennifer Spalding, 45, marketing director, who could only recognize her luck due to an Arce tree: her children’s swing still hung from a branch and the Christmas lights that her husband had still involved around the trunk.
Mrs. Spalding, her husband, Ryan, and her two children initially moved with their in -laws. They called Secofo, a subsidiary of Liberty Mutual Insurance, and told them that the adjuster would call them for a “lifestyle interview.” On the phone, when he broke up crying sometimes, the adjuster asked him what he could remember from each room in his house: What brands did they have? How many elements of each object? When she left the phone, Mrs. Spalding sent receipts for some of the tickets of tickets and photos of each room.
The family premium was around $ 3,000 a year. Like the policies of other housing owners, theirs consisted of a coverage A, for structure, coverage B for separate buildings such as a garage and coverage C, for the content, what they told him that he thought like this: if he could turn his house and shake him very strong, the content policy would cover anything that falls.
They received the content check less than two months after the fire, at the end of February 2022.
Lara and Trevor Ackerman paid less for their cousin, $ 2,000 in the year before the fire, but were insured for almost the same amount: just under $ 326,000 for their content. And the idea of ​​coverage consoled them, even when they found more than four aluminum pools sitting under where one of their cars had been left inside the garage, the silver puddles represent where the car wheels had been. “We both headed to each other and said, at least we have a good safe one,” said Ackerman, 52, software engineer.
It took months to complete most of the inventory, a voluminous spreadsheet containing 2,483 items, from expensive purchases such as its refrigerator, to the maximum minute, including the medium gallon of milk that was cremated inside the refrigerator. To be accredited for each order line, State Farm required not only a description of the object, but also how much it costs and its condition.
The total cost they told for their lost belongings: $ 322,624.
Now more than a year had passed since the fire, and they waited another month for State Farm to return the spreadsheet. Without explanation, the insurer had changed almost all the elements of her list to “average”, despite the fact that many elements, such as milk, had been entered as “above average” or as “new.”
Then, the insurer depreciated almost everything in her inventory, concluding that the couple was owed just over $ 131,000.
It was the beginning of a pong of years between the couple and the insurance company. From a sofa in the rent where the family moved, Mrs. Ackerman would review an impression of the exhaustive list and locked what she thought were errors. Weeks later, when the new inventory arrived, some Of the errors they had been solved, just to enter new ones, said the couple.
For example, the big ficus tree in pot that the couple had received as a wedding gift decades before had been depreciated to $ 94, although it would cost $ 500 to buy a new pot of that size. “I don’t think trees depreciate,” said Ackerman with irony.
Depreciation
One of the little understood clauses in many insurance contracts implies “depreciated value”, a measure of how much an object has lost from its purchase.
Decades ago, State Farm limited the depreciation of any article given to 50 percent, said Stephen Strzelec, who spent 17 years working for State Farm, even as a section manager in the company’s Alaska division in the 1990s. For example, a $ 1,000 sofa could be depreciated at least $ 500.
Since then, the company has increased depreciation to 90 percent. Now a $ 1,000 sofa can be converted into just $ 100, said Mr. Strzelec, who has testified in dozens of insurance demands since the company left in 2002.
The reduction of what the insurer pays was part of a review in the industry that began before the Allstate Corporation became a company that quotes on the stock market, according to the investigation of the research journalists Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe in “when McKinsey arrives in the city: the hidden influence of the most powerful consulting firm in the world.”
Allstate hired the McKinsey and Company consulting firm to help him increase profits. As a result of his McKinsey image change, Allstate instructed his adjusters to resolve claims in the fastest and most economical way, according to the documents revealed in judicial procedures. In mid -1995, State Farm, the Allstate competitor, also took advantage of McKinsey and sent instructions from his managers about a new claims approach: the progress program of advanced claims, or ACE, said Mr. Strzelec.
The program requested the adjusters to reduce the “sliding”, the “escape” and the “deficit”, terms that denoted the difference between what was paid in a claim and the amount of less than the insurer could have paid, according to Mr. Strzelec.
From the end of the 1980s to the mid -1990s, the insurers paid 70 cents in claims for every dollar they received in premiums. Two years after McKinsey’s image change in 1997, the payment had fallen to 60.2 cents. For 2006, despite the large amount of claims resulting from Hurricane Katrina, the relationship had decreased to 53.2, according to data from the Federation of Consumers of America.
“Each company has the right to obtain profits,” said Strzelec. “The question is, you know, how are the profits get?”
In a statement sent by email, State Farm spokesman Justin Tomczak said that accusations on the company’s claims procedures “do not align with our practices, our values ​​or our commitment to be there for our clients.” He also said that the company cannot comment on a claim that is in litigation, and that the presentation of a lawsuit does not corroborate the accusations. He added that State Farm “is committed to paying what we owe quickly.”
The tape becomes bureaucracy
For ackermans, the claims process caused both stress and conflicts that ended in marriage advice. A round trip with the state farm on the costs of three ribbons with vacations, green, red and white, pushed them on the edge.
When updating the endless inventory of the belongings they lost in the fire, the couple had forgotten to enter the total of $ 9 for the tape, they said.
The insurance adjuster had refused to update his inventory because they had omitted the dollar amount of each tape, with a value of $ 3 each, said Ackerman.
It was a surprisingly different experience from that of his neighbors.
Both families moved to new houses in December 2023, days before the two -year anniversary of the fire.
For Spaldings, it was an update: they used a personalized builder, and their new house is approximately 1,000 square feet larger than the one who burned.
Without easily available money, the Ackermans got a second mortgage and started a gofundme. “The process that we definitely passed the salt in the wound,” said Ackerman.
They ended up buying what they could pay: a modular house that met in a factory and got off in their empty lot. They fit as the lay people who were asked to list.
