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It's easy to complain about insurance companies. You pay them money month after month, and when a disaster finally occurs, they make it difficult to file a claim, or deny coverage or charge you a deductible worth as much as the amount you lost.
Rarely do you hear somebody praise their insurance company, or say they'd be its spokesperson, if they could. You must not know Lori Cheek.
Cheek had every reason to be skeptical of renters insurance. It wasn't required by her landlord; it was an extra expense for a young New Yorker already drowning in rent; and shortly after moving into her first NYC apartment, it had failed to come through.
"When I first moved to New York 23 years ago, my mom just kept telling me, 'You gotta get it.’ I'd never had it before, and I was renting an apartment in what was sort of a dangerous city back in the day. So I immediately got an insurance policy—I went with Allstate—and I remember it being just a little over $20 a month. So it really felt like nothing for the peace of mind of being covered if anything should happen.
"The crazy thing is, that first apartment got robbed. They stole $300 cash, and I had a $500 deductible, so the insurance didn't do anything for me," she said.
To pay for insurance, only to realize your deductible is more than the amount you lost, would be—to put it lightly—irritating. So I asked her if she considered canceling her policy after that incident.
"No. I guess my parents had just freaked me out over the years about being uninsured. Anything could have happened. Down the road I could get robbed again for more than $300. Sometimes mother knows best."
Several years and a few apartments later, Cheek finally learned firsthand why renters insurance is worth the cost.
"A woman fell asleep smoking on her sofa. It was the middle of the night, and I had even taken a sleeping pill because I had a meeting the next morning—one of the most important meetings of my career.
"I woke up in the middle of the night because I thought I heard somebody say the word 'fire.' Nobody came and knocked on my door or anything, but I looked out the window and saw fire trucks lined up my whole block."
Cheek grabbed a few things within reach and ran outside. As she left the building, glass fell on her head from above, and she realized that firefighters were smashing the windows out of the apartment directly above hers—that's where the fire had started.
"The next morning, they let us back in, and the first thing I saw was my laptop floating in a pond of water on my bed. Almost everything was destroyed, not by fire, but from smoke and the fire department's water, which they had used to put out the fire above."
That day, Cheek called her Allstate representative, who helped her start the claims process. Over the next few days, she submitted page after page of receipts for the items that had been destroyed. She obtained quotes for the price of items she didn't have the receipt for, or pictures of the items themselves.
"It was a very time-consuming process, but in the end, they covered everything I lost," to the tune of $15,000. "That was just the most comforting feeling. I would be the spokesperson for them right now if I could be."
Without that $15,000, Cheek's life might look a lot different now. In the following months and years, she founded and bootstrapped Cheek'd, her own twist on the modern dating app. It might not have been possible if she was starting her life from scratch. However, with countless hours of work, guerilla marketing tactics and even an appearance on “Shark Tank,” Cheek got her business off the ground, and it's still going a decade later.
Needless to say, Cheek still carries her renters insurance policy today.
The article, Entrepreneur's Apartment Destroyed by … Firefighters?, originally appeared on ValuePenguin.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
