Everything I've learned about homeowner's insurance, natural disasters, and recovery aid in 2025

Soon after 2025 started, a friend needed technical writing help on a project and I jumped at the chance. Today, it's been nearly a year and I'm still writing all kinds of things for a company called Bright Harbor.

I've kept doing it because I find the subject of natural disasters endlessly fascinating. As we ease into December, it feels like a good time to share everything I've learned this year and frankly, all the stuff I took for granted and was completely ignorant of over the last 20 years as a homeowner.

What's this company do?

Bright Harbor's pitch is simple. Take a bunch of specialists that worked for years in the insurance industry, government programs, and construction who all have tons of experience in disaster recovery, and let them help clients who are going through some form of loss. It's a for-profit company but Bright Harbor works with you generally as part of a HR benefits package customers don't directly have to pay for.

The company's origin story goes something like this: a few years back, a friend of one of the cofounders lost their home in a Colorado wildfire, and this friend was CEO of a small company who also had twin toddlers. The friend was obviously overwhelmed, not just from everything they owned burning down, but they now had to spend 20-40 hours a week filling out paperwork, working with insurance adjusters doing site visits, negotiating with FEMA, then vetting and hiring contractors to help manage an entire home rebuilding project. Of course that's in addition to this person still running their company and tending to small kids. Bright Harbor's cofounder hired a personal assistant for their friend and it was a fantastic way to save time and stress for the family, and the idea for a company was born.

It's absolutely wild that this kind of challenge is foisted on regular people who happen to live in a home in the wrong place at the wrong time and have near-zero experience working on a major rebuilding project, as it suddenly becomes their new part-time job for a year or two after.

Bright Harbor is basically a company filled with helpers. These folks walk clients through everything they need to do post-disaster, helping them apply and appeal aid offers. In the process of writing for them, I've learned a ton from researching and conducting interviews with industry folks.

I've been a homeowner for the past 20 years but never thought too deeply about my own home insurance and honestly until recently I didn't even know the details of my own policies. I've basically bought whatever insurance my mortgage lender required, I paid my bills on time, but I never thought much about it and probably never have made a real home insurance claim in my life before.

Soon after I started working at Bright Harbor, I started jotting down things in Apple Notes any time I said to myself "whoa, is that REALLY how things work?!" So here is a big list of what was new-to-me things that might also be new to you if you're a casual homeowner who never had to think about risks from natural disasters before:

Basic stuff

• In 2023, there was $114B in damage caused by natural disasters in the US. Insurance covered about $80B of that. So Americans absorbed roughly $34B in losses, having to pay for it through other means. $34 billion is a lot of money paid by regular people in just one year and every year we have shortfalls like this. (source: CBO)
• If a disaster wipes out your house completely, you should get your property immediately reassessed, so your property taxes can drop because taxes on a piece of dirt are a lot cheaper than if it had a house on top of it. Obvious, sure, but was a complete surprise to me when I first heard people do this.
• The most important thing you can do before a disaster ever strikes is walk through your house and take a long, slow video of everything inside. Take wide-angle photos of each room as well. There are amazing tools out there to automatically and instantly catalog everything found in photos and you can use those when you make any insurance claims for losses, thanks to the video/photos of your home's pre-disaster state.
• Underinsurance is a widespread problem affecting a majority of homeowners in the US. After major fires, every post-fire study reveals most people had outdated coverage based on materials and construction costs from many years ago. Chances are if something wiped out your home tomorrow, most people reading this wouldn't have enough insurance coverage to rebuild their home to exactly how it was, requiring new loans on top of everything else.

Federal disaster relief

Over the past year, I've closely followed FEMA's daily briefing report. That link is to today's current report, as a new PDF shows up every 24 hours and they're very extensive.

The USA is so large that there are often half a dozen major weather/disaster events happening somewhere in the country at any time. And sure, I know about the major tropical storms and big fires but often there will be a curveball, like suddenly flash flooding in parts of New Mexico, or dry fire conditions in one part of North Carolina while there is flooding on the opposite side of North Carolina, both at the same time. It's been a wild year for natural disasters with no signs of it letting up any time soon.

Whenever I'd check the FEMA reports a week later, and there will be half a dozen completely different disaster hotspots in completely new regions. It's remarkable and I honestly can't imagine FEMA ever going away (no matter what the current president says) because the rate of incidents and our country's needs are just so high. FEMA is a last line of defense when disasters are way more severe than any single state government can handle, and I sincerely hope its funding sticks around forever.

We found the nature of natural disasters across America to be so fascinating we launched a Bright Harbor weekly email summarizing ongoing disasters, and it gives readers visibility into the various fires or hurricanes but also gives warnings about stuff that may be approaching other parts of the country. For anyone interested in getting a whole country-wide look at ongoing disasters, I'd encourage everyone to subscribe.

More stuff I learned about federal disaster relief

• I assumed SBA loans were just for people with a physical storefront and a LLC that they wanted to launch. But the Small Business Administration is the only federal loan-granting agency that can get post-disaster money to people quickly, so homeowners and even renters can secure extremely low rate (2-4% 30yr fixed) loans to cover losses and rebuilding costs after disasters. Your first SBA loan payment is also delayed for a full year after you get a loan, which is a great relief during rebuilding. I literally had no idea this program existed for homeowners until I learned about it this year.
• FEMA money comes in several varieties, but it's all grant money you don't have to pay back and they're quite good at getting you up to $770 a day after a disaster for any evacuations, to pay for gas and a few nights in a hotel while you look for temp housing. Then they offer up to $43k for up to 18 months of temporary house rentals while you are rebuilding, and then there's another rebuilding program with a separate $43k limit. It's a remarkable organization working on a federal level across all our natural disasters that helps fill emergency gaps that insurance can't cover.

Stuff that was new to me about fires

• Before the LA fires, I was so naive that I assumed if your house burned down you probably didn't have to pay your mortgage afterwards because your house was now gone. But that's not how the real world works. Then I learned lenders will let you pause or postpone payments, but only when they are required to. There are two versions of this: forbearance pauses your payments for six months, but at the end of six months you need to pay a balloon payment of your missed payments (or use a loan or grant or your insurance payout to cover it), then there's deferment which is a pause for say, six months but now your 30 year loan is a 30 year and six months loan with slightly higher interest costs.
• To prevent your home from going up in flames as a fire spreads through your neighborhood, you basically need to do three things: clean out your gutters of any old leaves, add small screens to any roof ventilation holes, and clear plants and vegetation from the first 5 feet up against your home. Doing those simple things increases your chances of your home surviving a wildfire by over 50%.
• Getting double/triple paned windows and moving to metal or asphalt shingles on your roof greatly reduces fire spread and damage and should be something to consider upgrading whenever you do home renovations.
• Post-fire cleanup is way more complex that I thought, and is done in several stages even if your house is mostly gone. First there's general debris removal, then there's a bulldoze to the ground stage, and after that they scrape 6" of topsoil away and then there's extensive environmental testing between each step to make sure all the plastics and electronics that burned up in any fire are totally cleared away before rebuilding can begin. This is probably why the LA and Maui fire rebuilding seems slow, as it's a long process to make sure things are safe before a rebuild.

Stuff about floods

• Normal home insurance polices don't cover flood or earthquake damages, those are separate policies that cost much more and are riskier for both insurers and homeowners.
• Wind and fire damage is covered by insurance, and any water damage that takes place after wind rips off your roof is covered, but generally speaking water flowing from outside of your house into your house is considered flood-related and not covered by insurance. That last point was news to me.
• Flood insurance is rare, less than 5% of Americans have it
• Flood insurance is tough to get, you mostly buy a policy from the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) which is backed by the federal government since most private insurers don't want to touch these policies with a ten foot pole when a home is within a flood plain.
• Again, if a pipe bursts inside your house and causes water damage, that is covered by most home insurance policies, but water that comes from the outside and goes into your home isn't covered.
• 40 to 50 percent of flood damage occurs outside high risk flood zones, where people are not required to have flood insurance.
• In a 2019 report, CBO estimated that 77 percent of expected annual losses from hurricanes would be covered by insurance, but only 16 percent of the flood losses would be covered by flood insurance. So that 84% of annual hurricane flood damage not covered at all by insurance, which is kind of shocking.
• Flood insurance being so risky makes sense when you look at the math of it. The highest risk of flood is in areas where people live along a river or near a coastline. Those might be classified as being in a 100-year-flood-zone, which means there's a 1-in-100 risk every year of your home sustaining flood damage. When you think about a 30 year home loan, that gets your odds down to nearly a 1 in 3 chance of flood damage happening during the entire course of your mortgage, which for the insurance industry isn't great odds since insurance works when most people don't need it and use it only for emergencies.
• The one time I looked into earthquake insurance, it was bonkers. First off, signing up would double my annual costs of my home policy. Then, it had a super high deductible, like on the order of tens of thousands of dollars and there was a cap on payments that was less than the value of the home, so essentially while I doubled my insurance costs, I had to experience an earthquake that destroyed 25%-75% of my home in order to see good coverage. But since I don't live in Alaska or California where earthquakes are a constant, it seemed like an option not worth the cost for such narrow coverage.

Climate change realities

• Costs of disaster cleanup—even when you factor for inflation—are rising rapidly since the 1990s. I honestly don't know how the insurance industry will survive over the next few decades without major changes to how it works. Giant unpredictable disasters keep happening in new places and more often while most insurance companies based their policies on disaster math they conducted decades ago. Unless they change their risk profiles and calculations, they'll probably just keep trying to kick people off policies in high risk areas.
• Homeowners can reduce damage from floods and hurricanes by preparing their homes for it when we have ample warnings ahead of time. But we rely on NOAA and other orgs to give us those heads-up, but if NOAA is gutted because it's "too controversial" to track atmospheric changes, lives will be lost and a lot more money will go into disaster cleanup we could have otherwise prevented. My own state's coast is already at risk as tsunami alerts are set to go quiet soon.

I enjoyed spending the last year learning the ins and outs of disaster prevention and cleanup. So far this year I've done the following to better prepare my own home:

• I uploaded my home insurance's summary documents into Claude AI and learned I was overpaying for a couple features I didn't need or use, so I reduced and canceled those after double-checking with some insurance experts in-house.
• I reached out to the construction company that built my house and asked how much a total rebuild of my home would cost if redone today. I found out I needed nearly 50% more insurance coverage than I had, but in the end, getting more coverage was only about $150 more per year, which seemed reasonable to avoid the risk of coming up hundreds of thousands of dollars short after a disaster.
• I've done a contents inventory of my whole house in just a couple hours using Bevel, a free tool that takes your uploaded house photos and gives you realistic cost estimates of everything it recognizes in photos. You can use these estimates to judge if you have enough insurance to cover your home's current contents as well as use it for insurance claims in the future. It also allows for excel spreadsheet export of your home inventory whenever you want.
• I learned a ton about fire resilience and I'm happy I got leaf covers put over my gutters to keep them clear from dry leaves. We were lucky that our house was already landscaped with gravel and rocks closest to our home and we have no plantings within 5 feet of our house, even though our yard looks lush when you look out of any window.
• Learning what specific types of insurance coverage I needed and what I could reduce to save money helped a great deal in being better prepared for the worst. As was learning just a few small cheap fixes around the house could greatly reduce damage from wildfires.