Don’t Overlook Your Renters Insurance—Ever

February always reminds me of the most challenging experience my family has had as serial military renters. Since arriving at my husband’s first duty station in 2010, we’ve always chosen to live in on-post housing or rent a home off post, and before that, we rented apartments. We aren’t yet sure where we’ll settle in the end, so we hesitate to purchase a home. One of the most important things you can do as a renting military family is purchase renters insurance. With a military bank like USAA, it’s a very inexpensive monthly fee, but it protects you much more than you might imagine.

I found this out the hard way.

It was 2015, and my husband and I were living in a rental in Maryland with our only child at the time, and I was seven months pregnant with our second child. We spent a four-day weekend over Presidents’ Day with my parents who lived about two hours away.

We loaded up the car to return to Maryland, and less than 15 minutes after being on the road, my cell phone rang. It was our security system company notifying us that our basement door alarm had been triggered. They said they would investigate and call me back.

Their investigation was disheartening: The fire department had broken into our home to shut off the water and electrical system after a neighbor saw water pouring out of the attic of our house.

As we continued driving, maybe a bit faster than legal, my mind raced.

What would we find when we got there?

How bad was it?

Would we need to move?

If we moved, how hard would it be to find a new home? I was seven months pregnant, after all.

My husband was the first to enter our home and his face was grim when he returned.

“It’s bad,” he told me.

And it was.

Water was all over the house. Sopping wet carpet, our brand new dining room table covered in water, a smashed light fixture that fell after getting waterlogged. As I went upstairs, it only got worse. The water came from our attic into our bedroom, and the ceiling had fallen onto our bed.

Drywall and insulation littered our floor.

Our basement ceiling was caving in, but hadn’t yet fallen.

And it was wet everywhere.

I cried as I moved through the house, considering all the questions I had posed in my head before. My husband immediately got on the phone and called our insurance company. We grabbed extra clothing (things in our dressers had managed to say mostly dry, and our closet was, amazingly, unaffected) for all of us, found our cat cowering under the toddler’s crib and loaded her into the vehicle, boxed up a few items we wanted to keep an eye on, and we drove back up to my parents’ place.

I would stay there for one month while everything was worked out.

The culprit was a faulty sprinkler system. Our particular system was not designed to hold water in the pipes, but for a reason we may never know, it was doing just that. Since those pipes shouldn’t hold water, they aren’t insulated. A combination of frigid temperatures in a Maryland winter and that faulty sprinkler system caused the sprinkler line in the attic to burst. Water wouldn’t stop flowing until it was shut off.

I was never so thankful for vigilant neighbors.

While the experience was stressful, making our claim was easy. A moving company was hired through our landlord’s insurance (they weren’t great, but they did the job), an adjustor was sent to our home to survey our belongings, and we loaded all of our items into storage while we waited. The insurance company hired other companies to take our electronics, clothing, linens, pillows, furniture, and any other wet items to clean them and ensure they would still work.

I could sit back and let our insurance company handle the big stuff.

We unfortunately had to move out of that house permanently (it was deemed uninhabitable), even though we only got to spend just a bit more than a year there. The contractor didn’t think the cleanup and repairs would be completed before my due date, so the best option for our family was to find a new place.

In the end, it worked out and we were just as happy in our new house once we got settled. But we’re a military family and used to all the moves, right?

But what if we hadn’t had renters insurance?

It would have been painful.

The only things free of charge would have been the moving company hired by my landlord through his homeowners insurance and the coverage for the storage facility that was also paid by the landlord.

That’s it.

To put into perspective how expensive this incident was, our $12,500 policy was almost maxed out. But because we had a policy, we didn’t pay a penny.

Without that policy?

We would have had to handle the cleaning and repair of items on our own (or hire a company ourselves), and we wouldn’t have received any money to replace what we needed.

Not something we would have wanted to worry about with a new baby on the way. Because we had renters insurance, we didn’t need to worry about it.

In the end, we found a new home, and our cleaned and repaired items were delivered slowly over time. We had a kind, helpful group of my husband’s co-workers move us into the new place, and we slowly replaced the few items we lost (most of what we had was salvageable).

In addition to purchasing renters insurance for unexpected situations, here are two other things you should do to protect yourself in case something happens when you aren’t home:

• Exchange numbers with your neighbor, whether or not they are military-affiliated, in case anything happens while you’re away.
• Leave a spare key with trustworthy friends in the area so they can check on things if something happens.

No matter what your income level, be sure you budget for your renters insurance. It’s usually a fairly affordable policy, moves easily with you wherever you go, and covers even more than damages than in my story. If you already have renters insurance, be sure you’re covered for all you own and get a bigger policy if you need it.

It’s better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.