Sandy Updates New Year Edition

(Note: Most of this was typed about two weeks ago. I’ve added a few things since then.)

I am just now getting around to typing this. We have been super busy and will continue to be super busy for the coming month. An important deadline is coming up for us regarding the Insurance company… namely the deadline for filing a lawsuit. This is a deadline that we unfortunately can’t miss otherwise our case can be thrown out. It sucks that some parts of the law are more beneficial to the insurance company.

We’ve been working on paperwork nonstop and we finished the big thing we’ve been working on for ourselves and our neighbors to help them out. Essentially we are calculating through a program the cost to replace everything. Every piece of wire, doorknob, and every little thing that we can think of that we had and lost. It adds up to a lot of money It would be best if the insurance company would settle, if we have to sue them, a lawyer would get 1/3rd of the settlement, which is still money that we would need to rebuild.

Either way we still have more documents to go through for this whole thing and it is beyond tedious. This will be taking up a lot of our time and has let to almost no time to ourselves or time for relaxing. (I haven’t played a video game in like weeks. >_<)

We also went to a gathering for other people like us and got information/talked to lawyers/ etc. We also learned why our insurance company is being so difficult. After Hurricane Irene most of the insurance companies dropped a lot of people. Our insurance company was one of the ones people flocked to. Thus they have only been trying to pay out small amounts even when houses are 100% totaled.

We’ve also spoken with multiple lawyers and legal interns who are looking into things for us. These are have been meetings that have been going on for awhile.

Currently one of the combined things of paperwork is currently at least 80 pages long. And getting longer.

In addition we also learned that the town has raised the taxes on most of the unlivable houses. Did you know a CONDEMNED house can increase in value by $30,000?! Neither did I! So this is another thing we have to deal with because those taxes should not be there because we you know… don’t have a home we can live in.

One of the sad things that is happening is to some of our friends, when we were helping them with their paperwork one of the days they were over they kinda had a big fight. It was awkward and there was nothing we could do… and I do fear something like that happening to us. I don’t want that to happen… and I know we’ve had rising tempers and stress levels and it is scary because the tension is so high.

Heck we haven’t really been able to hang out with anyone in person or online recently. It is frustrating because we need stress relief and so many other things.

Oh, we also had a boiler pipe spring a leak at our temporary (ha ha ha is it still temporary a year and 3 months later?) house. And then last week we had another part stop working at 2 in the morning. Thankfully, we were able to get that fixed too.

This year has not started out too well.

Although we have had some good things happen… and I won a small Sword Art Online contest on Facebook… so there is that.