Today, the insurance adjuster made it out to the house. After spending nearly an hour, he came up with 21 pages of repair estimates totaling about $12k. I have to admit that this is less money than I thought it was going to be, but his estimate doesn't include the tree removal that we already had done. What really shocked me was that he sat there in his van and printed out the estimate and the check and handed them to us.
Unfortunately, the check was made out to our mortgage company. So we can't cash it. Nice, huh? After speaking with the mortgage company, it appears that we have to send the check to them, and they will cash it and create a restricted account from which we can withdraw the funds to pay for repairs. This is yet another example of how screwed up things are in the insurance industry. I can understand that the mortgage company owns most of the home until we have paid it off, but this is ridiculous. If they get control over the check, then they should be the ones paying the darn insurance bill AND they should be the ones making all of the phonecalls and dealing with the contractors.
I am so sick of the red tape that these companies force us to deal with. I can't wait to sell this place and build our next home ourselves. Will we have homeowners insurance on our new home? I guess we'll have to, but I'll be so happy if we can build it without taking out a construction loan. That way, when things go wrong and I an owed a check, it will only have the names of me and my wife on it.
The mortgage company says that it can take 5 business days for them to process the check and prepare for a disbursement of the funds. That's great, but what are we supposed to do in the mean time? I guess we have to just cross our fingers that none of our contractors request any funds up front.