Thursday, June 03, 2004
"Buying Frenzy"
The past several days have been spent buying new electronic devices! After speaking with our insurance company, they instructed me to buy items to replace everything we lost from the lightning and then bring them the receipts for reimbursement. The catch - the items must be of "like kind and quality." This is harder than you might imagine, especially when dealing with electronics, and more specifically, computers. My computer was an oldie but goodie, as it was still holding its own, but to get a computer store to estimate a replacement value is near impossible because you can't buy a Pentium II anymore. They tell me insurance companies want to see the cheapest replacement available, but after waiting this long, there's no way in hell I'm going to buy a base model computer when at the time I built this one, I used the best components available. So I think I'm going to compromise and buy a good bare bones system and build from there. It seems like it doesn't really save to buy each component separately anymore, because then you might have additional shipping expenses from each vendor. If I could find a prepackaged system without a monitor, I might do that, but I'll probably just end up ordering some good components online. I just need to do it soon, since we can't get reimbursed until we buy everything. Most people might take this opportunity to go crazy and buy the best of everything, but I am not really inclined to rip off my insurance company. I've known our agent since I was 4 and I just don't really have the desire. Now when our insurance doubles next year, I'll probably kick myself :-) The HVAC guy even suggested I put in a programmable thermostat to replace the normal one and that he would write it up for me as if our original one was programmable and I decided against it. He probably thought I was crazy.
On the other hand, some electronics go up in value. Haywood's Adcom amp and preamp both got damaged and replacement value was found to be $2200 for current Adcom equipment. So he compromised and got a 7.1 home theatre receiver, combining the previous two parts into one and technically saving the insurance company $1200. Let's just hope they see it that way, because if they "force" us to get the exact replacements, our claim amount will go way above the $2500 ceiling that we are trying to stay below. Evidently it is much easier to stay below $2500 because otherwise it has to be processed by the main insurance company, which is a big hassle.
Our house is now filled with broken items we have to hold on to until the claim is done and the new items we have purchased, so it's looking like a smaller version of Best Buy at this point. Any takers?
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The past several days have been spent buying new electronic devices! After speaking with our insurance company, they instructed me to buy items to replace everything we lost from the lightning and then bring them the receipts for reimbursement. The catch - the items must be of "like kind and quality." This is harder than you might imagine, especially when dealing with electronics, and more specifically, computers. My computer was an oldie but goodie, as it was still holding its own, but to get a computer store to estimate a replacement value is near impossible because you can't buy a Pentium II anymore. They tell me insurance companies want to see the cheapest replacement available, but after waiting this long, there's no way in hell I'm going to buy a base model computer when at the time I built this one, I used the best components available. So I think I'm going to compromise and buy a good bare bones system and build from there. It seems like it doesn't really save to buy each component separately anymore, because then you might have additional shipping expenses from each vendor. If I could find a prepackaged system without a monitor, I might do that, but I'll probably just end up ordering some good components online. I just need to do it soon, since we can't get reimbursed until we buy everything. Most people might take this opportunity to go crazy and buy the best of everything, but I am not really inclined to rip off my insurance company. I've known our agent since I was 4 and I just don't really have the desire. Now when our insurance doubles next year, I'll probably kick myself :-) The HVAC guy even suggested I put in a programmable thermostat to replace the normal one and that he would write it up for me as if our original one was programmable and I decided against it. He probably thought I was crazy.
On the other hand, some electronics go up in value. Haywood's Adcom amp and preamp both got damaged and replacement value was found to be $2200 for current Adcom equipment. So he compromised and got a 7.1 home theatre receiver, combining the previous two parts into one and technically saving the insurance company $1200. Let's just hope they see it that way, because if they "force" us to get the exact replacements, our claim amount will go way above the $2500 ceiling that we are trying to stay below. Evidently it is much easier to stay below $2500 because otherwise it has to be processed by the main insurance company, which is a big hassle.
Our house is now filled with broken items we have to hold on to until the claim is done and the new items we have purchased, so it's looking like a smaller version of Best Buy at this point. Any takers?
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