Guides are written to answer a specific question a renter actually has. We do not publish near-duplicate pages for minor wording variations, and we do not pad articles to reach a word count.
How a guide is made
- Research the question and what existing pages leave unanswered.
- Collect primary sources (regulator resources, policy forms, insurer documents).
- Draft, then edit for accuracy, clarity and unsupported claims.
- Check sources again before publication; date every update.
What we separate
Each guide distinguishes what a named policy form says, what depends on the insurer or on endorsements, what depends on your state, and hypothetical examples. Examples are labeled as hypothetical.
Independence and advertising
Advertising or affiliate relationships, if any, do not influence what a guide says. See the advertising disclosure.
Use of AI
An AI assistant (Claude, from Anthropic) does much of the work on this site under the owner’s direction: it reads policy forms and regulator pages, drafts the guides, writes the code for the calculators and checklists, and runs checks on its own output. We say so because readers should know. AI assistance is not a substitute for review by a qualified professional, and we do not treat it as one.
Review status (as of October 27, 2026)
- Research and drafting: done by the AI assistant from documents it could open: relevant provisions of policy forms from three insurers (American Strategic Insurance, Lemonade and Allstate), state-regulator and NAIC pages, FEMA, and one nonprofit and one trade publication. Anything it could not open or verify was left out or marked unverified.
- Automated wording checks: scripts compare quoted wording and figures in the drafts with text extracted from those documents. All 260 checks matched. This shows the wording exists in the extracted text; it does not show that our reading of it is right.
- AI self-audit: the same assistant re-read each draft against the documents and found and corrected 17 errors or overstatements. Because it is not independent, we do not count it as review.
- Independent professional review (licensed insurance professional or attorney): none. Because no qualified reviewer is available, we removed or rewrote every passage that would have needed professional interpretation so that each guide only reports what the named documents say, and one guide (on water damage from an upstairs neighbor) is held back.
- Review by the owner: the owner, Yago Rivas, has read the guides marked as read by the owner and checked them against official pages. Guides added later carry a note saying they have not yet been reviewed by the owner until that happens. Owner review is not professional review and is not presented as one.
What the notes on each guide mean
The note at the top of each guide says whether the site owner has read it. None of the notes means professional review. We will describe a guide as professionally reviewed only after a qualified person has actually reviewed it, and we will name the reviewer or their credentials only with their written approval of the exact wording.
Last updated: October 27, 2026. We will update this page whenever the review status of any guide changes.