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

Soon after 2025 began, a friend needed short-term technical writing help for 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 Bright Harbor, a company that helps people rebuild after they've lost their homes in a natural disaster.

I want to say upfront it's wild that regular people with almost zero experience in any of this are instantly forced to take on the immense challenge of rebuilding their home just because they happened to live in the wrong place at the wrong time. Rebuilding suddenly becomes your new part-time job for at least a year to get your home back to how it was. During the LA fires, I heard a lot of first-person accounts about the trauma of losing a home but the aftermath that extends beyond can be just as stressful on survivors.

As we ease into December, it felt like a good time to share everything I learned this year and honestly, all the stuff I completely took for granted and was totally ignorant of over the last 20 years as a homeowner who was just lucky not to have suffered a natural disaster.

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 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 HR benefits packages that homeowners don't directly 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 saved time and stress for the family, and the idea for a company was born.

Bright Harbor is basically a company filled with helpers. These folks assist clients with everything they need to do post-disaster and help them apply for aid. Since everyone working there has been through the wringer multiple times, they know when an insurance offer is way too low, how you write effective appeals, and how to jump through all the necessary hoops to fully rebuild your home.

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 details of my policy. I've basically bought whatever insurance my mortgage lender required and I paid my bills on time, but I don’t think I’ve ever had to make a home insurance claim 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 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

• 2023 was a big hurricane year and there was about $114B in damage caused by all natural disasters in the US combined. Home insurance covered roughly $80B of it. So Americans absorbed $34B in losses, having to pay for it through other means. $34 billion is a lot of money paid by regular people and each year we have similar shortfalls. (source: CBO)
• If a disaster wipes out your house completely, you should get your property immediately reassessed, so your property taxes can drop significantly because taxes on a piece of dirt are much cheaper than if it had a house on top of it. Obvious, sure, but was a surprise to me when I first heard that people do this.
• The most important thing you can do before a disaster strikes is walk through your house and take a long, slow video of everything inside, opening cabinets and drawers to show what's inside. Take wide-angle photos of each room too, and store that all in the cloud. There are amazing tools out there to automatically and instantly catalog things found in photos and you can use those when you make any future insurance claims for losses, thanks to your 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 study I've read reveals most people had outdated coverage based on materials and construction costs from years ago. Chances are if something wiped out your home tomorrow, most people reading this wouldn't have enough coverage to rebuild their home to 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.

The USA is so large that during the summers there are often half a dozen major weather/disaster events happening at any time. And sure, I hear about major tropical storms and big fires but often there will be a curveball, like sudden flash flooding in places you think of as dry like Arizona and New Mexico, or there will be risky fire conditions in one part of North Carolina while there is flooding on the opposite side of the state 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 check new FEMA reports a week later, and there will be half a dozen completely different disasters in new areas. 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.

Tracking emerging natural disasters across America is so fascinating that we launched a Bright Harbor weekly email summarizing them. It gives readers visibility into the various fires or flooding and warnings about stuff that may be approaching, along with interviews with industry folks. For anyone who wants an ongoing, country-scale look at natural disasters, feel free to subscribe.

More stuff I learned about federal disaster relief

• Before I started this work I assumed SBA loans were only for people with a physical storefront and a new LLC. But the Small Business Administration is the only federal loan-granting agency that can also get post-disaster money to people, so homeowners and even renters can secure extremely low-rate loans (2-4% 30yr fixed) to cover losses and rebuilding costs after disasters. Your first SBA loan payment is also delayed for a full year, which is a great relief during rebuilding. I literally had no idea this program existed for homeowners until this year.
• FEMA money comes in several forms, 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 an evacuation, to pay for gas and a few nights in a hotel while you look for temporary housing. Then there's up to $43k to cover up to 18 months of house rentals while you are rebuilding, and there's another rebuilding program with a separate $43k limit for the most emergency of repairs to make your house livable again. It's a remarkable organization working on a federal level across all our natural disasters that helps fill gaps that insurance can't or won'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 any longer because your house was gone (kind of like if your car was totaled tomorrow, would you have to continue loan payments in the future?). But that's not how the real world works. Then I learned lenders will let you pause or postpone payments 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 bills (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 your 30 year loan will become 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 spreading 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 whenever you do home renovations. Also, some states and counties have programs to help offset the costs of better fire-resistant materials and techniques, helping you pay for those upgrades.
• Post-fire cleanup is way more complex that I thought, and is done in several stages even if your house is mostly burned away. First there's a general debris removal, then there's a bulldoze completely to the ground stage, and after that they scrape 6" of topsoil away but there's extensive environmental testing between each step to make sure all the smoke from plastics and electronics that burned up in a fire are 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 would be 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 if your house is located in 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 causes similar damages inside 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 84% of annual hurricane flood damage isn't covered 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 1-in-3 that flood damage might happen during the course of your mortgage, which for the insurance industry isn't great odds since insurance works when people don't need it and use it only for emergencies.
• I looked into earthquake insurance for my own home and it was bonkers. First off, it would double my policy costs. Then, it came with a high deductible in the tens of thousands of dollars and there was also a cap on payments that was less than the value of the home. So for essentially doubling my insurance costs, I had to experience an earthquake that destroyed at least 25% but not more than 75% of my home in order to come out ahead. Since I don't live in Alaska or California where earthquakes are a more regular threat, it didn't seem like it was worth the cost for the narrow coverage limits.

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 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 base their policies on disaster math they estimated long 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 government orgs to give us a 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 saved. My own state's coast is already at risk as tsunami alerts are set to go quiet soon.
• Fire seasons and hurricane seasons are getting extended by months to the point they can happen at almost any time of year and the idea of higher/lower risk seasons is starting to seem like a quaint memory.

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 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 after canceling some features I didn't need and wasn't using. This seemed like a reasonable amount of spending to avoid the risk of being hundreds of thousands of dollars short if a disaster ever struck.
• 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. You can also download an excel spreadsheet export of your inventory any time you want.
• I learned a ton about fire resilience and I'm happy I got covers put over my gutters to keep them clear from dry leaves. We were lucky that our house was already landscaped mostly with gravel and rocks against our home and we have no plantings within a few 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 fixes around the house could greatly reduce damage from wildfires.