Making a Plan - Insurance

I am afraid it will take us more than one week to make a family emergency plan. I may have set some unrealistic expectations, but also it is worth noting that things that involve coordination are more difficult. A family dictatorship might be able to get around it, but it would have other problems.

(And if at this point you want to wax philosophic about things like the efficacy of martial law in the case of a disaster and so on, you are welcome to do so. There is some fertile ground for discussion there.)

The part that caught my attention for the section on making a plan (https://p.widencdn.net/5rdg1y/redcrossprepareguide p.5) is the recommendation for additional insurance, because flood, earthquake, and tsunami damage generally aren't covered.

It caught my attention for two reasons. First, we had separate earthquake insurance until recently, and then a missed payment due to financial hardship resulted in abrupt cancellation. There wasn't a warning or a phone call, we were just terminated. Those are the rules, but they seemed harsh.

I did understand the justification for separate insurance. For the most common things, like a house burning down or an appliance failing and leading to water damage, those are things that happen here and there, and that's how the insurance company pays. Even with a large windstorm, the overall percentage of houses with damage for an area will probably remain small.

Getting a large earthquake or a river flooding or something like that tends not to be limited to one house in a neighborhood. No insurance company wants to cover all of the damage in a neighborhood that was flooded or reduced to rubble.

Generally speaking, that's why you want to have the governor or president to declare a disaster, because it opens up additional resources to the area, so it is not the insurance that is needed. Of course, sometimes you hear bad things about their performance.

This leads to the second reason this section weighed on me. I recently watched When the Levees Broke, a documentary about Hurricane Katrina. Yes, there were some issues with government response, during and after, but some of the insurance companies were not too helpful after either.

Okay, you may be thinking that there was a flood, which generally wouldn't be covered but there were things that should have been covered, like wind damage, but then it was blamed on the flood. The insurance companies acted like a bunch of weasels, and that is insulting to weasels.

(One of the grim moments of humor came from one of the affected homeowners parodying their slogans. You are not in good hands. You do not have a good neighbor.)

I don't have a good answer for this. It may be worthwhile to purchase additional insurance, and I obviously thought it was once, but you may also find that you do things that should help and don't.

All I can really recommend for all of this is to operate with faith. As you plan, be sure to pray. If you feel like you want the additional insurance, get it. If you find yourself looking for ways to learn how to make repairs yourself, that may allow you to bless many others besides yourself.

I realize that is not as comforting as it could be, but one easy mistake to make with preparation is to use it as a means of control, and there will be a lot that is out of your control. You can try and take steps to make things better, and be greatly rewarded for those steps, but it won't allow you to fix everything.

I had to accept this a while back during a first aid class. I am a big believer in first aid training, but I realized that it had limitations. I will not be able to fix a decapitation. If I am the one injured, I will need to rely on someone else's knowledge (depending on the extent of the injury). That may not happen, and my training could end up being very useful, but I don't know. The more I depend on knowing, the more my preparedness level is an illusion, and I don't want that.

Adjust your expectations accordingly while you prepare.