Hurricane Harvey will be a monumental challege for the vast majority of victims who don’t have flood insurance, but Andy Smith, the Senior Vice President of the California based financial planning company Financial Engines and host of the ‘Investing Sense’ program on 1200 WOAI says it doesn’t have to be a financial disaster, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
Smith says there are a number of options available to individuals who must rebuild, and he says a catastrophe allows many savers the opportunity to tap into otherwise inaccessible savings.“Tap into available home equity lines of credit, see if you can defer payments on other types of loans, you can take 401k loans, you can withdrawals from IRAs.
Financial Engines has put together a web sites that helps people sort thourgh the financial turmoil which will rule their lives for the coming years.
https://financialengines.com/education-center/harvey/
Smith says another challenge that Hurricane Harvey survivors will face will be the fact that experienced and very convincing scammers descend on every catastrophe, to play on the fact that most homeowners don’t understand how much these repairs should cost.
“People are pretending to be contractors, asking for money up front, and then not showing up,” he said. “Actual contractors are raising materials and personnel costs to unreasonable levels.”
And Smith says you don’t have to be in the disaster zone to become the victim of Harvey scammers.
“Emails are already going out about these specific stocks which are supposed to just ‘pop’ in the aftermath of Harvey,” he said.
Then there’s the hundreds if not thousands of flooded cars, which were the stable of TV news airborne shots of flooded apartments and parking lots during the story. Smith says many of those will wind up as ‘low mileage used cars,’ with no word given to buyers that they were once completely underwater.
“Car scams, so these cars that are flooded, they are getting tried out and will probably be on the market again, we saw this in Katrina.”
Smith says there are ways to survive the second round of the disaster, the one to your wallet. But he stresses that challenges will be out there.