As a homeowner, you need to have insurance on your house, even if you hope to never use it.

When you do need to file a claim, however, you should be able to expect that they will pay out what you are owed without any trouble.

The dad in this story had a terrible experience with the insurance company but found a great way to get what he was owed.

Check it out.

Insurance Company tries to screw family, gets nailed.

The year was 1987/88 and I was a college senior.

My brother is three years younger than I am and was a sophomore in high school.

My parents had just finished remodeling our home, especially the kitchen and bedrooms and had taken a trip to Florida.

My brother decided to have his girlfriend over for dinner and decided to cook her french fries.

Now, the new stove was some sort of 80’s ceramic cook-top.

Those can be very dangerous.

I cannot remember the brand name but I do remember you could not tell if the stove was on or off except for an orange light.

These kind of stovetops only heat the pan – there is no gas or electric burner.

You literally cannot tell if the stove is on other than putting your hand on it.

It’s ridiculously stupid design and probably not made anymore ( its wasn’t induction).

So my idiot brother, pours oil in the pan to makes the FF’s and either forgets to turn the stove off or doesn’t see the orange light that it is still on.

Classic family story.

He goes into the other room to get laid. ( there is great family debate about this to this day)

Did you know that hot oil does not evaporate?

It just keeps getting hotter.

Oh no!

Well the oil eventually explodes all over the brand new cabinets and immediately sets the kitchen on fire.

Bro has just enough time to grab the dog and girl friend and call fire dept before running out of house.

Fire dept is amazing and knocks fire down after only burning out the brand new kitchen and dining room.

Significant structural and smoke damage but house is still intact.

Oh, this is all happening while my folks are on a plane back from Florida.

I won’t get into what happened to bro but suffice to say, he had to hide in the woods for a few days.

Now this is where it gets good.

People laugh at him, until the receipts are needed.

My crazy father has a giant filing system, all paper where he has the giant metal racks in the basement where every thing ever purchased is in an accordion file on the metal shelving in some sort of ridiculous filing system that only he can use.

EVERY. RECEIPT. Since 1963.

So once the dust settles, my father calls the insurance company to file a claim.

As we all know, insurance companies tend to be large, greedy, bureaucratic companies with zero interest in helping people.

Insurance company starts asking for receipts.

All of them.

Father goes into his filing system and begins producing every single receipt the insurance company asks for.

Now understand that the house is unlivable at this point. The smoke damage was pretty severe.

And they are stalling.

Finally, they come back with an offer that is ridiculously low.

Now, my father is not a calm person and hates insurance companies and lawyers more than anything.

As a very successful businessman, he has had his share of lawsuits and takes particular joy in suing crooked lawyers and insurance companies.

So, he goes nuts when they make this lowball offer and immediately files suit against them for violating the homeowners policy.

In the meantime, he has to find suitable living arrangements fro family, deal with agents, get contractor estimates, etc.

I asked my father why he didn’t just take the money and being rebuilding.

Good for him!

He says “these people do this to people all the time and people have to take the money in order to rebuild but I’m going to fight them.”

So he begins painstakingly researching the policy with his broker.

Fast forward a few months and I’m home for the summer and to work on rebuilding the house.

The entire family is working on the house when there is a knock on the door.

My brother answers.

The guy says, “Are you X?”

My brother says, “Yes”.

What!?

They respond, “Consider yourself Served.”

The look on my brother’s face was priceless and we were hysterical.

He didn’t understand and my father says, “I am suing you”.

My father sued my brother for negligence.

The same insurance company provided us with the contents policy as well as homeowners insurance.

See where this is going?

Ohhh, perfect!

The insurance company would have had to represent my brother under the Homeowners policy.

The insurance company called the NEXT WEEK.

Settled the case in full.

The next year insurance law in my state was permanently changed to prevent that from ever happening again!

Wow, it isn’t often that you can get one over on an insurance company. Well done.

Let’s see what the people in the comments think about this story.

Oh, they certainly do.

This might have been a good idea, but more work.

It is always a good idea to push back on insurance companies.

It seems like a weird law.

Absolutely!

Great job sticking it to the insurance company!

If you thought that was an interesting story, check out what happened when a family gave their in-laws a free place to stay in exchange for babysitting, but things changed when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain.