Filing Moving Claims Part II

     My last post about filing claims talked about the process up until submitting the final claim. Here is what needs to happen next! Once that final red “submit claim” button is pushed you will receive an email stating that the moving company has received it, this may take a few days. If you have not received a response about your submitted claim call your moving company to confirm whether or not they received it. The moving company will then make an appointment with you to send someone out to look at and take pictures of all the damaged items. For some reason they need their own photos even after you spent all that time submitting them yourself

     For our claims process, after the guy came to look at our items I believe it took about 2 weeks to receive notice that the moving company had given us an offer on our items. The offer can be seen on the DPS website where you submitted the claim. On each item it will show how much you asked for it and how much the moving company is willing to offer. Now it’s up to you to decide if you think you got what you wanted. The next step is VERY important! You have to accept EACH offer individually. So if you have 15 items you have to click on all 15 items one at a time and click “accept offer.” If you don’t accept the offer on one item you will not get the money for it. Lucky for us the money we were offered was reasonable so I did not have to counter offer anything so I don’t have much information on that. I do know that if you do counter offer an item you’ll need to provide well written explanation as to why you should get more money for that particular item.

     The items that can be repaired will have an offer of a repair price. This is their estimate on how much it would cost to fix/repair your item. If you accept the offer it does not mean you have to repair it. We had 2 chips in our living room TV stand but you can’t see it unless I point it out. The TV stand was 100 dollars. They offered us 75 dollars to have it repaired. It was not worth the haste of finding a repair person. So we accepted the offer and ended up pocketing 75% of the original value. Now is the right thing to do? Some would say no and that that money if given to you for a repair. But honestly, that TV stand is going to go through another overseas move and could get damaged again. So when looking at the amount you are offered take into consideration how much you paid for it and what percentage they’re actually offering you.

     Now once you’ve accepted the offer on EACH ITEM you will again get another response from the moving company. We got an email around 5 days after accepting our offer asking for our address. About 2 weeks later we received a check in the mail. Our claims process if finally 100% over and I can finally throw out our old broken couch that is hogging up the garage space! 

Here is a small recap of the process. 

This is actually taken directly from the claims page! 

1)      You should notify the Transportation Service Provider (TSP) [the Moving Company] of any loss or damage to your personal property within 75 days of the delivery of your shipment. 

2)      There are two ways to notify the Moving Company of any loss or damage to your personal property, but only one way to file your claim. 

               A.  Loss and Damage Report. Using forms provided by the Moving Company, you can notify them of your loss or damage at the time of delivery and/or after the delivery. You can also file a loss/damage report in the DPS claims module. NOTE: You do not have to file a loss/damage report as long as you file your claim within 75 days of the delivery of your shipment. Submitting a loss/damage report does not constitute filing a claim. 

              B.  Filing your claim. You must file your claim in the DPS claims module. TO prepare to file your claim, you will need to know what items were lost or damaged to include the inventory number, year of purchase and purchase cost. Pictures of damaged items can be uploaded into the DPS claims module. Once your claim has been submitted, your Moving Company will contact you with an email within 30 days to complete the claims process. 

3)       Step by Step instructions for both loss/damage report notification and how to file your claim are located at www.move.mil