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> Yes replacing 25k worth of contents isn't that big a deal (although it would suck),

This would be absolutely devastating to most people in America (and the world). Being able to tank a $25k loss without any insurance help is a very privileged position.

I don't have a point of contention with your comment. I just wanted to make that observation, because I think it can be easy for many of us to forget it.

I'm sure that most of that 25k wouldn't need to be replaced. Clothes, dishes, furniture would be the main items. And for me, 90 percent of my closest really needs to be purged.

I'm not sure a house fire would be the best way to purge your closet, though. As funny as a sitcom with that plot would be, I'm sure there's a better way in reality.

If you feel overwhelmed by the prospect of purging, try doing it a piece at a time. Even make a game of it: when you get dressed in the morning, you also need to pick an item. That item goes into a box near your front door.

When the box is full, go donate it, burn it in the back yard, what-have-you.

That's a plot point that is used a lot, and it's not really a sitcom thing. More of a hero's journey get-him-Jack-Reacherized sort of event.

I had it happen once in a move: At 23, all my possessions got squeezed into 6 packages (5 of which were media mail), a bookbag, and a checked luggage. Everything else got thrown out or given away. I'd been living in a furnished room. At the new location, the only thing I needed to replace was a computer monitor.

In an apartment or house fire, you've lost _everything_. Picture your bathroom in your mind and think of everything you need to replace just in that one room.

Toiletries and soaps. Towels and washcloths. The shower caddy and the shower curtain. The plunger. The cleaners under the sink. The books on the back of the toilet.

Now do the same calculation in your kitchen, your bedroom, your family room. The couch, those chairs, a TV, your mattress and box spring and bedsheets and blankets, dishes and glassware and silverware, pots and pans, and so on. Even if you own cheap stuff, that all adds up very quickly into a loss most people can't readily absorb, even when you factor out the pile of stuff you don't wear any more and really ought to donate. I think we could inventory a lower/middle-income renter's belongings and spend $25K pretty easily.

And do it while suddenly homeless.

I doubt it’s accurate. Most people underestimate their contents, personal property and clearly in this case their liability risk. As much as people want to hate on insurance, it is in fact an enabler for economic stability.

Definitely, I was replying to parent who didn't seem to have a problem with a $25k loss.

I begrudgingly get insurance for certain things because I hear enough times how insurance will find a way to avoid paying for even those supposed protections. I hear that plenty times from homeowners where insurance refuses to cover anything they should have paid for due to improper evidence and it’d have been cheaper to save and invest the money spent instead of going through the adjusters while, say, waiting for a new roof. Then there’s the costs once you do eventually file and receive a legitimate claim for your liability (the primary upside of group insurance as a policyholder) and many insurers will refuse to carry you going forward. So it’s almost a one time benefit for many. On the flip side, insurance fraud exists but is definitely prosecutable while I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone winning against an insurance company’s lawyers for being denied a claim unjustfully.

This is a serious topic, and it turns out that the relationship of insured-insurer is just really complicated.

Moral hazard and adverse selection are real issues insurance faces: that being covered makes the insured more reckless, and that people with higher risk self-select to sign up for insurance.

OTOH, insurance companies make more money the less claims they pay.

I think serious topics need to be discussed a lot more because the things that cost Americans the most day-to-day are housing, healthcare, and arguably insurance (when it doesn't work for them) - all of these things are "complicated" and it's as if we stop being able to talk about anything substantive anymore as a society. Forget the death of long form journalism, how about longer, serious discussions? Every other person I talk to about these things just doesn't seem to care and it's pretty much "X is hard, let's go shopping" left and right, including from people that are otherwise rather educated and smart. We seem to be too exhausted for whatever reason to learn enough to act rationally, which is rather important for a capitalist system like we have. This tendency goes all sorts of ways from political topics to nonsense like anti-vaxxers and so forth.

Nobody ever liked shopping for insurance. Nobody ever liked trying to find a job. Nobody ever liked "find a market niche" and "marketing their unique skillset." The Neoliberal fantasy is that all life choices are reducible to consumer decisions, and people love to pull out their spreadsheets and calculators and make those decisions in the most rational way possible, and it just isn't true. We want healthcare, we don't want to shop around for health insurance every single year, terrified that we will die (or be bankrupted) if we make the wrong decision. We want meaningful work, we don't want to negotiate terms on 85 different freelance contracts per year. We want government services, we don't want to stand in line at 87 different agencies and try to understand the difference between SNAP and CANF or the DMV vs the DPS vs the County vs the City. We want a home, we don't want to read the tea-leaves of what the Federal Reserve is doing with interest rates and what the Case-Shiller index says this quarter. We want a good education for our children, not a consumer choice amongst 3 different competing charter schools.

In general, we want to run our lives like people instead of like miniature conglomerates. Peoples' tendency not to want to live like automata is not the problem: the problem is the system they are trapped in which forces them to live as automata.

Sadly, even worker's compensation insurance that the state runs and that one is required to pay into by the state is the same way. I only wish I could stop paying the premiums to these crooks because I sure as fuck can't get treatment for the injuries I sustained on the job. If I have a few thousand dollars to get a lawyer and pay witnesses and get super lucky, maybe I could get treatment but I'd rather spend that money on actual healthcare than gambling on insurance. Some insurance is just a scam to steal money (Washington State worker's compensation) indeed. That's how America treats its workers steal from then and leave them on their own to deal with their pain. Insurance my motherfucking ass.

Not even mentioning the ridiculous costs (especially in the US) that come into play should the fire that started in your unit injure or kill anyone.

My buildings and contents insurance cost me about $280 a year, I happily pay that for the peace of mind of being covered if shit happens.

It’s great, if the insurance company actually pays when your circumstances merit compensation.

Insurance companies, to my knowledge, almost always pay out for "normal" claims on standard policies, with some reasonable exceptions. That's why when they don't, it's news. You may not get all that you think you deserve, or you may get more (after the 2011 tornadoes, our insurance paid for a new roof, although only about a third was damaged by the falling tree).

We have filed a few claims over the past 10 years, including:

Water damage due to a sudden burst of a pipe. Required expensive drying of walls, replacement of part of the drywall and replacement of the flooring. Dealing with insurance was extremely pleasant.

Burglary of house. Lost laptops, camera, time machine, diamond earrings. Similar experience. Surpringly, the rule was: if you want to be reimbursed in cash, you get the current value (which is close to zero for a 6 year laptop). But if you buy a new laptop, you get the original purchase price reimbursed. “Hello new MacBookPro!” Zero complaints about the insurance.

> time machine

Wow! How much was the replacement cost for that?

probably talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPort_Time_Capsule, which works with time machine (the software)

Yes, that. :-)

Which company? I know State Farm isn’t good

Farmers.

Insurance paid for all of a new roof after my 14 year old roofing was struck by a hail storm. I’ve heard of others having problems with various aspects of insurance, though, and given the size of the insurance market, statistical patterns or data would be more useful to read than posts by one or two people on HN.

I tried finding data on insurance payout/refusal rate when I was considering switching to a cheaper but lesser known car insurance company. It doesn't seem to exist. So much for consumer choice.