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Insurance Information
Valuing Your Property
Adjusting the Loss
Replacement of Valuable Documents and Records
Salvage Hints
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 A pre-fire inventory along with a videotape of all your property
could prove to be a valuable record when making your claim.
When adjusting your fire loss or in claiming a casualty loss on
your federal income tax, you will have to deal with various
viewpoints on the value of your property. Some terms used are listed
below:
- Your "personal valuation" is your attachment to and personal
valuation of your property lost in a fire. Personal items have a
certain sentimental value. This term is not meant to belittle
their value to you but is used to separate feelings about the
value from objective measures of value. It will be objective
measures of value which you, the insurer, and the Internal
Revenue Service will use as a common ground.
- The "cost when purchased" is an important element in
establishing an item's final value. Receipts will help verify
the cost price.
- Fair market value before the fire also is expressed as
"actual cash value." This is what you could have gotten for the
item if you had sold it the day before the fire. Its price would
reflect its cost at purchase and the wear it had sustained since
then. Depreciation is the formal term to express the amount of
value an item loses over a period of time.
- "Value after the fire" is sometimes called the item's
"salvage value."
- The cost to replace the item with a like, but not
necessarily identical, item is the replacement cost.
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