Who writes this, and how
This site tells people where to find money for their roof and which insurance deadlines are real. That is a subject where it matters who is talking and where they got it, so here is all of it.
I built this for my own house first
I bought my first house at forty-five. Nobody hands you a manual with the keys, so I started keeping a list of what needed doing and when, and I added to it every time I found something out the hard way.
Every checklist I could find had been written for somewhere else. So my list turned into a calendar built for this coast, at three levels of effort, because the first year should not be overwhelming. Then it turned into this, because the calendar is only half of what is hard about owning a house here. The other half is the money: which programs exist, which deadlines are real, and who actually decides.
Chad · Gulf Coast Home Maintenance
The rule every grant and insurance page follows
It is unusual enough to be worth stating, because it is the reason to trust the pages, and it is also the reason they say less than some other sites do.
- This site organizes the question. The institution keeps the answer. Every grant page maps one program, in plain language, and then sends you to the agency that runs it. We do not restate a rule the agency could change tomorrow and present it as settled.
- Every fact is checked against the primary source, and the page carries the date. Not a press release, not another blog: the department's own page. The date at the top of each resource page is the day somebody read that source. If it has been a while, treat the agency's page as the answer and ours as directions to it.
- A page goes up when its facts have been checked, not before. That is why the shelf is short and grows slowly.
- We run none of these programs and decide nobody's eligibility. Nor does any other website. Eligibility is decided by the agency, on its own application.
- No invented numbers. Where a figure is not verified, it is not printed. The calculator's lifespans are Gulf South figures and are labelled as guidelines rather than guarantees, and the grant figures come from the programs' own pages.
If something here is wrong, tell us
Programs change between funding rounds, agencies move their pages, and a date that was right in August is not automatically right in March. The agency's page always wins over ours. If you find something on this site that no longer matches the source it names, that is worth five minutes of your time and it gets fixed.
Messages reach us through the Etsy shop, which is where the printables are sold and where the message box is.
There is no comment section, no forum and no account to create. Nothing on this site asks for a phone number, and the free tools do not ask for an email either.
How this pays for itself
Three printables, sold on Etsy: a maintenance kit, a storm season binder, and an edition branded for real estate agents. That is the entire business.
There is no advertising here, no affiliate link, and no lead selling. Nobody pays to be mentioned. The grant and insurance pages send readers to government agencies, which pay us nothing, and those pages would say exactly the same thing if the shop did not exist. If a page ever recommends something we are paid for, it will say so on the page, in the same sentence.
The site counts visits, and that is the only thing watching you here. What it collects, and what happens to your email if you give it, is on the privacy page.
What this site is not
Not affiliated with any agency. Not with FEMA, the NFIP, IBHS, or the insurance department of any state. FORTIFIED is IBHS's trademark. Program names belong to the programs.
Not advice. Nothing here is insurance, legal, financial or engineering advice, and it is not a substitute for a licensed inspector, a contractor, or the terms of your own policy. It is a map, drawn on the date stamped at the top of each page.
Not a lender, and not about loans. The pages cover grants: programs with a published eligibility rule that can be checked against a primary source and dated. Lending is a different kind of claim and this site does not make it.