What do you say to the unapproving insurance rep who doesn’t want to pay for your sea-side condo because it’s too fancy?
“Beach, please…”
So lately you may have been wondering why my pointless parables have been slightly more sporadic. Well, long story short, I’ve started a new career as an interior designer. Sort of.
About 4 months ago our house sprung a couple leaks, and it all appropriately started when my mom, who was in our kitchen at the times sent me this pic, accompanied by a pithy, yet ominous, message:
“Serious problem, lots of water. Xo”
*Sigh*
Welp, Mom-stradamus has turned out to be a modern-day oracle indeed. Not only did we have an obvious kitchen sink leak, but the insurance adjuster uncovered a much-longer problem with our master shower.
And yada, yada, ya, here we are, living 3 hours away at the beach for 4 weeks while are house is put back together with a few, er, “modifications.” Perhaps down the road I’ll document for you the domestic debacles that I’ve managed to get into by micro-managing the project manager of our repair/remodel project–as foreshadowed by my reference to becoming an interior designer–but that will have to wait for now.
Right now, if I may, I would like to #HumbleBrag about how I got my family a month-long beach-side stay courtesy of Amica Insurance…
As it turns out, insurance will pay for you to stay elsewhere while your house is being repaired as part of a home-owner’s claim. So early on, we got the bright idea to just jam out to a mountain cabin or a beach house instead of staying within 30 minutes of our hometown. Since we all either work from home or attend school virtually, there was no logistical reason why we couldn’t.
Now while our insurance agent had been doing a superb job of taking care of us, she was surprisingly cagey about the process of finding a place to stay during the repairs. When I originally floated the idea of staying in the mountains, long long ago when we thought it would be for maybe a week, she was hesitant, suggesting that I send her a link of any place we were thinking of staying so she could ask her boss for approval. Apparently, she’s dealt with people who had the same basic idea as we did, except these assholes went all out and booked a high-end ski resort and tried to get the insurance to cover it.
Fair enough, I thought…
Fast-forward to about 2-1/2 weeks before the contractors were going to start ripping our house apart. It was only at that point that we found out the exact dates we would need…and the first time we faced the reality of living in a strange and foreign land for 4 whole weeks.
I called “Emily”1Yes, that is her real name. What the ----- does it matter at this point? and had a Groundhog Day experience where we repeated the exact same conversation as before, and I walked away with even less of an idea of what a reasonable price for alternate accommodations looked like.
It being barely two weeks out, I immediately started scouring VRBO, AirBnB and other various mountain rental websites, only to come up with 4 or 5 decent options that were available for that entire time frame–and this didn’t even begin to address the “Anne” and “Frank”2Aka Checkers & Chess. situation. Again, details about the complications arising from being new pet parents are beyond the scope of this tail,3Do have to point out the pun here? and will have to wait their turn to be revealed.
The price tag for 4 weeks at these places came in between $4500-$6000, which all in all, was actually fairly reasonable. A brief cursory look at vacation rentals near us showed that was about what we would expect to pay if we stayed local, so I was pretty confident there would be no issue with our little plan.
Now, I hadn’t had the chance to run these options by the Boss Lady, but since time was of the essence, I fired off the links to these rental to ol’ Emily on this particular Friday afternoon. I wanted to get this ball rolling and a bangin’ cabin booked, ya know?
Over that weekend, the Boss Lady and I finally had a chance to discuss things, and it turned out that she really wanted to hit up the beach instead. Just great. All my hard mountain rental research had just gone down the drain. I told her if she found some suitable places, I would consider them at least.
Sunday afternoon she found quite a few options…except they were closer to $8k-$10k, rather than the $4k-$6k that I had already presented to Emily. I had to talk the Boss Lady down from some of the more expensive options, and we finally agreed that the luxurious “Eden Cove 9”–aka EC9–should be acceptable to all parties, given that I could save $500 by booking directly with Better Beach Rentals instead of through VRBO. Just over $6k, so no one should be complaining, right?
But before we continue, I need you to check out the listing for this place on VRBO here. Any description that begins with “absolutely the most luxurious town homes on Oak Island!” is going to be mother ----- winner, amiright?
Anyways, Sunday night I shot the manager at BBR a few important questions that I needed answered before attempting to get Amica’s approval–most importantly, “I see this property is pet-friendly. Are there any additional pet fees?” This was very coyly worded, in hopes of them revealing whether or not “pets” meant “cats, not just dogs” without me revealing that we very much so indeed need to bring our to feline family members with us.
Well, come Monday evening, and I haven’t heard a dang peep from either Emily or the BBR manager. At this point, I’m getting pretty antsy, because I know that all it takes to make any of our options suddenly unavailable is for some dingus to rent the place out for Easter weekend or some other asininely small number of days. So I decided to make an executive call: I just went ahead and reserved ol’ EC9–a non-refundable move, though, mind you.
I sent Emily the bill and explained to her that I pulled the trigger because time was running out, but, hey, I saved them $500 by booking direct, so all should be well, right?
Wrong.
Mid Tuesday morning, I hear back from Emily for the first time since Friday. Apparently, she hadn’t bothered to tell me that she had sent the mountain rentals I had shared with her on to her supervisor for approval, and she was “having some issues justifying the pricing” with him. Allegedly, they “were able to find some very reasonably priced rentals in [our] area.” Further, she made an argument that EC9 was too fancy, and that alone should disqualify it: “location can have a huge impact on pricing and obviously a rental by the beach with a pool is going to be more costly than a home in your area.”
Ah, snap. They were gonna give me flack for a $4500 rental? Had I totally missed out on local options in the “very reasonable” price range? What is that anyways? $2k? Either way, what was done was done, but I faced the very real possibility of being on the hook for $4k of our rental…ugh!
So I humbly set out to see where I had gone wrong and did a thorough search of the AirBnB and VRBO options near our home, as if we had decided to stay local instead. How did that turn out, you ask? Let’s just say the facts were not in Emily’s favor, and she got the full Point of the Story treatment, starting with a histogram of the options, excluding the one outlier that would have actually been cheaper than EC9:
What you can’t see in the picture is the cheapest option, a suspiciously cheap but otherwise decent-looking place in Durham (uh…no thanks!). While its nominal price was $2900 the additional taxes and fees would bumped that up to $3792. Tack on the $700 it would have cost to board our two cats elsewhere, and suddenly this “very reasonably priced” rental comes out to about $4,500. Yes, that’s right, the same amount they were “having a hard time justifying” us spending on a mountain cabin rental.
Lies! All lies, I say!
The best part about this is, see at the bottom of the picture “Executive Rental, Apex NC”? This was our second cheapest option. Its nominal price was $5,844, so appeared slightly cheaper than EC9, right? But by the time you actually checked out ($7,821) and added on the cat boarding ($700), those A-holes at Amica would have been looking at a bill around $8,500. Would they have us rack up a bill that is $2,400 more just based on the principle that we should stay local?!?
But here’s the real problem: check out the Executive Rental’s listing here. If you’re in a hurry, here’s a quick peek at the master bedroom, replete with a completely unnecessary sofa for some reason:
You basically have to call long-distance to talk to somebody on the other side of the frickin’ room, for frick’s sake! Apart from not having a pool, this place was waaaaay fancier than EC9–and our current house. I bring up our house, because they make a big deal of trying to match the luxuries and amenities of your house, but really don’t want to go beyond that if they can help it. This all lead to this little juicy nugget and I included in my fact-based and fact-filled response to Emily:
“[referencing the Executive Rental] Now, most of the other options in this price range aren’t quite as fancy. But that brings up a very confusing question for someone who is dealing with enough of a stressful situation already: would you force us to stay in less nice accommodations, even if they were more expensive?”
It was a serious question for these ----- fat-cat bureaucrats. I was certain they were going to make us stay in $9k local shit-hole, just to make sure that we weren’t one iota more comfortable than we would be in our regular home. Insane, I say!
Well, long story even longer, I fired off my courtesy reply to Emily, including thorough documentation of my research, and was left holding my breath hoping that cold, hard facts and basic common sense would prevail. Because of course she couldn’t have been bothered to shoot me a quick reply acknowledging the information I had just shared with her or anything like that.
I was a nervous wreck for a good day and a half before getting a text notification out of the blue, informing me that Amica had issued me a payment. I rushed to my computer and checked lickety-split, and confirmed that it was indeed for the full $6,123.86!
I had won! I had really won the battle with the insurance company! Oh, happy happy us, we’re going to the beach; oh, happy happy us, we’re going after all!
Okay, so that didn’t rhyme. So sue me. It was a huge ----- relief–especially because I had actually managed to bear that burden all by myself, and hadn’t mentioned a word of the situation to anyone.
And that gets us to the point of the story: in retrospect, I realized that they would have probably never approved our little beach trip had a obediently waited for Amica’s approval before booking it. Indeed, this a living example of the old adage “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” Though, now that I say that out loud, I think it’s supposed to read “easier” than “better,” right? Oh well, you get the point.
Now, why would I cryptically hint that “some sins are never forgiven”? Well, I’ll get around to it, but I promise to share the, uh, “experience” that EC9 would have in store for us. Stay tuned…
P.S. Yeah, sorry I didn’t ask your permission to assault you with such a long meandering tale…I beg your forgiveness, Dear Madam or Sir…
Content created on: 1 April & 1-2 May 2021 (Thurs/Sat/Sun)
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