Advice I Hope You Never Need

Last week, some very good friends of ours (who live less than a mile from us) had their house broken in to. A few days later, one of their cars was broken in to. While no one currently thinks the events were related (there have been a rash of car break ins in the neighborhood), it combined for an emotionally and financially stressful week.
On Friday night, we showed up on their doorstep with a bucket of KFC and to offer any emotional or practical support we could. In talking to them, I was able to put together a list of information/advice that I hope none of my readers ever need, but it’s still important to know.
Know what your insurance policy covers:
In this case, their policy assumes that they will have a separate rider for jewelry, so it covers stolen jewelry only up to a certain (fairly small) amount. However, if they don’t file a claim on the jewelry rider, the company will apply any amount that goes over the limited reimbursement to their deductible.
Even though they didn’t have a jewelry rider (no really expensive pieces and not a lot), the insurance company will still apply any overages in their jewelry loss to the deductible. They weren’t actually certain it would be needed, but it was nice to know.
Be able to prove you own what you own:
Let’s be honest, most of us don’t still have the receipts from purchases we made 3 months ago, let alone 3 years ago, even if it was a $3,000 television. However, one of the nice things about all the computerized point of sale systems that stores have is that they do have that information, and they keep it forever.
Our friends had bought almost all of their high end electronics at the same store. And with one call to the customer service department, knowing what month and year they had bought items, the company was able to pull up their receipts. The phone rep was going to email them to my friends, but also provided numbers that they could take to the store to have the receipts printed out there.
I don’t usually do business with Best Buy because of a bad experience I had there over 11 years ago, but in this case, I want to call out the wonderful customer service my friends received. Those receipts represent the majority of the monetary value of what our friends lost, and the quickness and courtesy of the Best Buy representatives made obtaining those receipts a relatively painless process.
For him, his entire pocket watch collection was taken. Luckily, they had his watches serviced at a local store that provided warranty information with detailed descriptions of each watch.
The difficult part will be her jewelry. She had a number of family heirloom pieces, so there’s no receipt, nothing close to a receipt. And because they were in a style she didn’t wear, most had been looked at once when they were given, and then put away in a “safe” spot.
Here’s the lesson she (and I) are taking from this- When you get a piece of jewelry, take a picture of it. You can be wearing it, or it can be in the box, but take a picture. If its an heirloom, make a note of who it came from, how long its been in the family, etc. That way, you have all that information.
Don’t store all your information in the same place, or only one place:
Taken in the theft were one desk top computer, and three laptops: her new laptop, his old laptop, and her sister’s laptop.
Luckily no one tried to get into their locked file cabinet with all the financial records, but quite a bit of information was stored on the laptops (especially her sister’s).
Because the thieves didn’t get everything, they have a lot of their information where they can easily access it, but if they didn’t, there are a number of things they could not recreate.
The sister now has to issue a complete credit watch and notifications for identity theft, since her computer contained complete tax information including her social security number and driver’s license information.
Consider additional types of “insurance”:
In this case, we were talking about software that will let you remotely wipe your hard drive. If your computer logs on to the internet, a code is instantly sent out to wipe everything on the drive. This may not work with old computers, but with new laptops which all come equipped with wireless cards that log on the second they get the chance, it’s another way to protect your information.
We also talked about the guy who was able to remotely access his stolen laptop’s web cam. He just kept posting pictures of the guy who had it until someone was able to identify him.
This is by no means a complete list of things that need to be done or can be done, but it is what I got out of an evening’s conversation.
I hope you never have need of this advice.
h