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(Photo credit: Jimmy_Joe, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode)

 

Hello, my name is Douglas.  I recently bought a house.

It was…… a nerve-wracking decision.

 

I had a lot of worries eating me up.  The worries would whisper to me….

“What if you lose your job…. and can’t pay your mortgage?”

“What happens if the house is a money pit and you burn all your money on expensive repairs?”

“Can you really afford it?”

 

The best way to get a monkey of your back like that is to bring it to the front where you can see it in full view.

I did some good old budgeting and evaluation to understand my level of risk and minimize it.

So, I researched the cost of the house, looked at my finances and calculated how much emergency money I would need to keep going for six months if I lost my job.

I set a home evaluation pre-condition to minimize the chance of any nasty repair surprises when we moved in.

Still, one thing did continue to niggle at my mind – climate change.  More concretely, how will the increasingly extreme and changing climate impact my house as an investment and home?

This was brought to the forefront of my mind as I read the news about the Hurricane Harvey in Houston.

As a Global News article noted

‘Blair Feltmate, head of the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo, said many homeowners in Harvey’s path of destruction do not have flood insurance and when families return home they will be forced to pay out-of-pocket or take on more debt for the necessary repairs.

“The costs associated with the mental stress are going to be phenomenal,” said Feltmate. “Only about one out of six people in the Houston-area have any sort of insurance coverage at all, otherwise they are on their own. And even the coverage they do have will be very minimal.”’

And we are talking about a lot of damage – $185 billion USD!

“How climate change proof is my house?”

“What does climate change even mean for my house?”

Climate change is so abstract – what are actual concrete impacts on house?

How can I minimize the risks presented by climate change and the changing environment?

So I have started to research and dig into the impacts of climate change, starting with insurance.

Next: Climate Change, Housing Insurance and My Home