I was driving to the gym yesterday morning and I was listening to the Brenna and Brenna Law Forum on WHAM 1180.  This is a great show that I enjoy listening to when I’m able to catch it because they field calls from listeners and dispense some really good legal advice.

I was listening yesterday and a listener called in and said that their daughters’ apartment had a fire and she lost all of her belongings and didn’t have renters insurance.  The caller wanted to know if there was anyway that she could sue the landlord to pay for her lost belongings.  Apparently the fire marshal deemed the fire accidental due an electrical wire failure. 

Knowing that the woman didn’t have renters insurance the attorneys indicated that she may be at a loss to get her belongings paid for, but indicated that she could have an engineer inspection to determine the cause of loss or go back to the fire marshal to find out more about the cause of the fire.  The attorney’s believed that if she was able to determine that the fire was caused by the landlord’s negligence or caused by an electrical contractor that performed faulty work she might have the chance of suing the landlord and/or the electrician to have their insurance pay for her damaged belongings. 

Now this is obviously good advice because I’m assuming that the woman was probably out $15,000 or more and that is a big chunk of money.  The only problem is that she could be incurring costs that won’t necessarily guarantee that her belongings will be replaced.  An engineer’s inspection would probably run $200-$500 and who knows how much attorney’s fees would cost, maybe $1,000-$2,000.  She could potentially be out another $2,500 and still not have her belongings replaced. 

She could have saved herself the headache of getting an engineer’s inspection, hiring an attorney and going to court if she just purchased renters insurance in the first place.  Even if she would have purchased the bare minimum policy covering her contents for only $12,000 it would probably have cost her less than $100/year.  It’s crazy to think that she could pay $2,500 to try to have her belongings replaced after the fact, which isn’t guaranteed or just purchased a renters insurance policy for less than $10/month and been guaranteed that her belongings would have been replaced. 

Now obviously hindsight is 20/20, no one ever thinks that they will have a fire in their apartment, so they don’t think that need to insure for it.  That is what insurance is there for, you pay it hoping that you’ll never need it, but if you ever do need it, it’s nice to know that the insurance is there for you. 

I cringe every time a talk to a renter and they say that they don’t have renters’ insurance and don’t want to purchase it.  Especially if they are already paying for auto insurance, they can usually get a multi-policy that can substantially reduce the cost of renters’ insurance.  It can reduce the cost to $60/year or less.  I had one client that it only cost them an additional $3/year to have renter’s insurance after taking into consideration the discount they received on their auto insurance.