To everyone and anyone reading this post, you MUST know that whenever submitting a claim to State Farm, you must expect to appeal and go after your rightful settlement no matter what they tell you!  For reasons that are too boring to go into, we still have State Farm covering our home.  But watch this:

We recently had a pipe burst, flooding out lower floor and ruining the hardwood.  State Farm was very quick to send out one of their adjusters, a nice woman with a clipboard and a pencil.  The woman poked around, took measurements and left -- in about ten minutes.

Roughly a week later, I received a check for roughly six thousand dollars.  Nice, except that the damages were way higher than that.

I immediately called the State Farm adjuster, and faxed her a notice describing everything her "field agent" had missed, including three rooms and four walls that were heavily damaged.  But then I went even further, calling in floor and wall contractors to estimate the cost of repairs.  Each contractor came in with a bid three times higher than the State Farm amount.

I faxed those estimates to the State Farm offices, too.  They decided to send out their own contractor, who submitted his own estimate, which was only twice as high as their original.

Within four more weeks, I received another check from State Farm, which actually covered the damages in a non-fiction format.

Moral of the story:  Get everything documented, keep copies and show them you mean business.  It is, after all, just a business to them.

Rob,

Proceeding cautiously here! My wife and I are business owners in (withheld by Rob to prevent retribution from State Farm).

We are currently being withheld claim payment from a May13th 2007 burglary at our store. Not denied, they have claimed for 7 months they are investigating! Well we lost 17,000 thousand dollars worth of inventory from a 1 year old startup business that was doing extremely well. 

There (sic) failure to pay this claim has now forced us to shut down 1 brick and mortar store and we are in jeopardy of losing more. The real kick in the nuts here is my wife is visually disabled not 100% but she will be eventually due to eye condition. Its her business and DVR and the Bureau of the blind helped set her up for future self employment for the disabled.

The thief's (sic) stole her PC and wrecked other equipment that allows her to operate the business as normal despite her disability. This allows her to maintain records and prepare them for our accountant, do banking, inventories and other things a business owner would need to do. 

Now our good neighbor has been investigating claim, refuses to explain, what, why or anything. They keep requesting documents over and over knowing how hard this is on my wife without the equipment they are denying replacement of (special rider just for this equipment)

Now they have begun sending large bundles of our records they requested, re-copied in extra small legal text and tell my wife to legally confirm the accuracy of all records. There is so much more to tell you but i will need to find out a little more about you. I have documents, tape recordings and transcripts and have documented 7 months of this. we sat back and have let them proceed unabated but not unrecorded. Now its time to act!

I also run a network of websites and webstores and was going to do the same thing you are doing to our neighbor online, but am cautious due to wifes claim status. I have the ability to host video, tapes, documents, or anything else, and it cannot be shut down or spammed away. Several of our sites have good PR with google and the link power they have is a great publicity tool.We also have customer forums and the users love to spread information down the highway. 

Hope to hear back from you soon!

Jason & Judy

(If you would like to contact Jason, reply to Rob directly)