Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt were among the thousands of families who’ve lost their home in the Los Angeles fires. Since their evacuation, Spencer has been documenting it via social media. He posted a scary video of the outside of their house in flames, as well as a video taken from his son’s baby monitor showing the bed on fire. Once he was able to return to their home, he did a tour of what was left of the home. There have been so many devastating stories like these and the videos provided a personal glimpse into what so many are going through right now.
Of course, Speidi wasted no time hustling. Last week, Spencer urged people to stream Heidi’s 2010 record “Superficial” to help them generate some extra income from it. If there’s one thing that Spencer and Heidi are good at doing, it’s sharing their lives with the public. On Wednesday morning, they appeared on Good Morning America to tell more of their story. They emotionally recounted what it was like to evacuate and the immense feeling of loss they have. They also mentioned that, just like many other
Angeleno, they were dropped from their insurance policy.
Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag Pratt are sharing their pain after losing their home in the Los Angeles wildfires. The longtime reality TV couple and their sons Gunner, 7, and Ryker, 2, will have to rebuild entirely from scratch after losing all of their material possessions in the fires.
“Spencer was like ‘Grab anything you want to keep,’ ” Heidi shared through tears during a Wednesday, Jan. 15 appearance on Good Morning America. “And I was like, ‘How do you choose?’ You know? My brain stopped working because I was so overwhelmed with so many things you can’t replace. So I grabbed my kids’ teddy bears.”
Spencer also got emotional recounting the experience of watching his children’s bedrooms burn on the cameras.
“The worst was like our kid’s room that was so magical,” The Hills alum recalled, getting visibly choked up. “We do story time each night, it’s like our routine, so much love is in there. Our son’s bed started just burning in the shape of a heart. The fire started in the shape of a heart. I was like, ‘This is like, out of body insane.’ ”
The couple have been documenting their post-fire experience as they start to pick themselves up, replacing less valuable items such as clothing, but some things they lost are irreplaceable.
“I feel like a ghost,” Spencer admitted. “I don’t have a single photo now from before an iPhone existed. I don’t have any of the dumb little things that are on your shelves in your parents’ they’re all gone. Not a single nothing.”
The reality TV stars’ home and possessions were not insured, as they claim their insurance company dropped them from their policy.
“It’s a place that you love that you live, it’s a refuge from the world. And to have that be gone, it’s a really difficult concept to continue to daily deal with,” Heidi said through tears. “We were house poor as they call it. We have a house and everything else is a hustle, is a grind. So yeah, we’re definitely counting every dollar that we make. We’re working really hard to take one trip a year.”
That thing about the bed burning in the shape of a heart…I know it’s just like seeing shapes in clouds, but I understand why he would highlight that and hold onto it. During hard times, people look for anything they can to give them comfort or faith that everything will be alright. And the insurance policy thing…what a mess. I do feel awful for them and everyone else who has lost so much. I have a feeling, however, that we’re headed into another Speidi era, so this is probably not the last we’re going to hear from them for a while.
And while a lot of the stories coming out are from the Pacific Palisades, there are still so many others who have been affected in the Eaton and Hurst fires, too. I shared a few lists of resources to donate to the other day, and they’re worth sharing again.
I feel terrible for anyone who has lost their homes in these fires. Spencer and Heidi included. I will point out, however, that Heidi is wearing an Hermes 140CM scarf in her TV appearance. Those retail for $1400 USD. Did she take the time grab that on her way out?
Maybe she did. I don’t really see how that matters..Are you saying she may have bought the scarf after the fire? I highly doubt it. But I think you can assume that rich people who evacuate will indeed wear the expensive clothes that they grabbed from their closet. Doesn’t mean they are not feeling loss or in financial trouble.
I had a bit of a eye roll when I noticed the scarf and the upkeep of surgery on her face, a bit hard to cry poor when that’s how you present yourself, yes what happened is a tragedy but for them it’s now a career opportunity, stuff them, I have empathy for the people you don’t see going on TV making it all about them
If it’s a scarf she wears, and grabs it because she’s running out the door, certainly. I don’t think she had time to check price tags. Rich people (or people who live like rich people in their case) have rich people stuff. If I recall, they blew scads of money on luxury stuff in the good times. Surely now isn’t the time to sneer at a person who’s lost everything? Even when celebrities go broke, they still have all that stuff they bought. It just becomes their stuff.
@Caitlinmom Your first two sentences were fine. After that–
please take a seat. There’s one open next to Justine.
@NoHope (clapping emoji here x 1000)
@NoHope ha and thank you!
What is with the seriously judgmental and cringey replies as of late? Longtime Celebitchy reader. Don’t remember it being so bad
So what if she did? I’ve been in situation like hers and let me tell you, the scramble to get everything you can is real. We shouldn’t judge her for what she grabbed while packing the car. I remember being so focused on getting every single picture out that I didn’t grab any underwear or socks or shoes. I literally just grabbed a big chunk of my closet and threw it in the car…which included stuff I hardly wear. You don’t really have much time to pack like it’s a vacation or something, it’s a emergency and literally have very little time so you grab whatever you can without even thinking about it.
I noticed the scarf right away. I’m not mad at it but I do find it to be very out of touch/lacking in self awareness for this particular interview. I lol’d when she referred to the “fan” support. I’ve streamed a few of her songs lately, but I’m definitely not a fan.
Maybe someone gave it to her to wear. Or maybe it was in a storage unit. Whatever.
They are renting his parents house while his parents are staying in an apartment. For all we know it’s her MILs.
Let’s not get nit picky so many lost everything. If she has a nice scarf. Which could be a knock off for all we know also.
Let her have something nice.
These two. The hustle is strong. Asking people to stream her album is smart and they have lost everything, so I won’t nitpick. Hopefully her parents in Colorado can help. It’s heartbreaking when natural disasters destroy so much for so many.
Can insurance companies just drop ppl after a major incident?! Is that not illegal?? Or is this one of those if you missed a payment we have an excuse thing?
I’m glad their family is ok. Absolutely traumatic for the kids. I hope Spencer is out of his Crystal protection phase because he could easily spend 5 figures replacing them
Not illegal but rather common business practice in the industry.
These people were dropped by their insurance companies before the fires, which is legal.
I am devastated for these families but no one calculates risk like insurance companies and casinos. If you are ever dropped by your insurance company please find new insurance ASAP. Or bounce if you can. Trust me, insurance companies believe in climate change, even if they don’t call it that.
@NikkiK 100% what you said. We need to yell loudly for the folks who refuse to believe: INSURANCE COMPANIES KNOW THAT CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL.
You know who else is losing their homeowners insurance? Folks in FL. The insurance companies know FL is going to wash away. Desperately trying to get my parents out of there, but they won’t budge.
There is no alternative. If one company is calculating the risk, so are they all. There is no other policy available to them. Screwed. They are all in a tough spot. 😢😢
So the issue is California put a cap on what Insurance companies can charge. Insurance companies claim they lose money at those rates bc the real estate is so $$$ and fires have eaten into their profits.
We’re watching Climate Change meet Economics and hopefully, Political Movement.
Companies like Allstate dropped a lot of insurance policies at the end of last year; policies expired 12/31/24. A lot of people have been scrambling to find new insurance, and when they do find insurance, the prices are astronomical.
We were dropped from our insurance after I had a major accident as a teen. I had a very minor accident a year back that resulted in damages less than what I paid in a year. They doubled my premium to $300/mo, which I’ll have to pay until it falls off years from now. If I hadn’t just taken a job that required me to drive because there’s no transit to the area, I’d have immediately sold in the car in outrage. (One of the many ways America screws over the taxpayer by forcing us to be reliant on vehicles AND carry insurance for them, giving them all the power.)
@Curious I have been following Spencer on Tik Tok after the fires. While he said he lost about thousands in crystals. He is still very much involved in them. It seems to be his source of comfort wearing the one he has.
Also, if anyone has noticed. He wears the same shirt everyday. I don’t know if it’s just his way to promote Heidi. Or it’s just the only shirt he has.
The heart-breaking stories of people dying while trying to put out raging wildfires are a powerful reminder of the attachment we have to our homes and the memories they hold. It’s also a powerful reminder that we are wholly, completely, and devastatingly unprepared for a future of catastrophic climate change.
I swear if I had kids, I would never sleep knowing the mess we are leaving for them to contend with; knowing that this is a man-made problem that was completely avoidable.
What an unconscionable failure of mankind.
In total agreement–we are totally unprepared for climate change. What can we all do? Prepare a go bag wherever you live. I’m going to do that this weekend. Make sure all of your important stuff is in a place where it could be snatched up. Take weather advisories seriously and prepare for them.
We’re just at the start of the climate catastrophe. My son will 78 in the year 2100–he’s 2 now. I can’t even image what the world will look like then if we don’t get our act together.
I believe, deep down, that Americans (speaking as an American) have this idea that someone or something is going to come along and save us from ourselves. Maybe we watch too many superhero movies. Our problems are just going to somehow “get fixed.” We put our belief in the stupidest of places based on the flimisiest of evidence because we think someone’s going to swoop in and save us. We haven’t even started to realize how utterly wrong this is.
Current estimates predict 1.2B climate refugees by 2050.
“I believe, deep down, that Americans (speaking as an American) have this idea that someone or something is going to come along and save us from ourselves.”
Absolutely this. There is a level of collective denial born out of both self-preservation and cope. I also think that Americans in particular really cannot conceive of how bad things are going to get. Even as we watch NC get flooded by hurricanes. Iowan rivers flooding into farmland for the first time in 100 years, Florida canals getting wiped out by hurricanes, nor’easters and bomb cyclones becoming the norm in New England, TX and areas of the south getting snowstorms….
I blame every single politician who, over the past 40 years failed to pass meaningful climate change legislation or worse yet, those who actively obstructed it. I blame every single powerful person from members of Congress to fossil fuel CEOs who put profit over people. We didn’t have to do this—this was a deliberate and willful choice. I take comfort knowing that in the end, this will be a case of FAFO for billionaires and their brethren, because no bunker can save them from what’s to come.
Kitten, I laugh at the billionaires who think their bunkers will save them. I read somewhere that they’re all afraid that their workers will just kill them in their bunkers and take all the stuff for their own families. Apparently some of them met to discuss how to prevent this and came up with things like: shock collars for workers? Messing with their access to food to keep them in line (those billionaires will be SO DEAD SO FAST if they do that).
They need people to take care of them, and they can’t even imagine the people who work for them turning against them, and they are completely incapable of caring for themselves.
“I read somewhere that they’re all afraid that their workers will just kill them in their bunkers and take all the stuff for their own families”
LOL I’m sorry but that’s fucking hilarious. What you describe here is basically just a micro example of our macro society. We’re all just faceless labor to the billionaire class–we’re all just a means for them to further their wealth. Deep down they know they’re nothing without us which is why they’re always furiously pushing for automation and artificial intelligence….anything they can to replace us and free them from their dependence.
I lost my ability to have children in my thirties, but at this point, it’s more a relief than anything else. I look at climate change, the political instability, the escalating class divide, and I’m just like…I would refuse to engage in this even if I had the ability to. I’m not giving the upper classes my children to work to death in wage slavery while they sit in their mansions and watch the world burn, nor am I going to bleed out on a table so a conservative can feel self-righteous and pretend a benevolent god cares about them. I’m not your chattel.
I keep reading about people getting dropped from insurance, because it sounds like many families are reporting this and I wondered how that could be dropped in the middle of a fire. My reading said that insurance companies dropped customers months ago. If no private insurer will take them there is a CA based insurance they can obtain. But it also seems since fire insurance is not required some people opt not to get the CA based one. If any of these facts are wrong I’m very open to correction, I’m really interested in understanding this issue.
It’s certainly the insurers discretion to not insure home in a high risk area, but it also seems homeowners here should be prepared to replace their home if they are uninsured or take the best option available to them. I sympathize with the loss of irreplaceable items, but if you are house poor you certainly shouldn’t be leaving yourself unprotected in such a high risk area.
You are correct! They were dropped before the fire. I was reading another story about a homeowner who didn’t have insurance because he couldn’t afford it. And he couldn’t get into the California program because they would have required home to clear brush and get rid of trees on his property, which he said was too expensive. SMH.
The answer is that the government should be subsidizing insurance for high-risk areas. Corporations are profit-driven and have virtually no motivation to help people. The entire private insurance system is designed to avoid loss by denying claims.
“If no private insurer will take them there is a CA based insurance they can obtain.”
You’re referring to Fair Plan and it’s still very much private insurance. It’s just a pool of carriers that take on what is essentially assigned risk i.e. insureds who cannot obtain insurance because the traditional markets have pulled out of the area entirely. We are covered under Fair Plan here in MA because we live by the ocean even though we are out of the flood zone. It’s way more expensive than what we paid before our insurer stopped providing coverage for our area.
Sadly, the answer is that people shouldn’t live in these areas. I know that seems completely unrealistic right now, but it’s true. People will either need to self-insure or move.
John Oliver did a great episode about this in the context of floods. People are incentivized to re-build in the same place, with the same house footprint. Some folks have re-built 3x. WHYYYYYY?
Right but I think there’s a difference between someone that built a house in the hills of Los Angeles 60 years ago and someone who rebuilds their house in the same spot after it’s already floated away during 4 separate storms. The former didn’t have a crystal ball and had a reasonable expectation that wildfires wouldn’t affect their neighborhood and the latter is just an arrogant asshole.
I feel you though–it reminds me of people in my hometown who rebuilt their beachfront homes on stilts after they were wrecked by flooding, as if there won’t be increasing erosion and steadily rising sea levels….what a fool’s errand.
The middle ground answer is the government should be paying to relocate them. The average American is not responsible for climate change. That’s the 1% and their companies pushing out billions of gallons of carbon so they can be rich and jetset anywhere. We would’ve had transit and electric cars years ago if oil and car companies hadn’t paid off congress for years. We would have better infrastructure if the ultra wealthy were paying their fair share or frankly taxed out of existence.
The only satisfaction I get out of this is knowing there’s no escape for these scumbags in the end. There won’t be any Mars terraform project or cushy space station to save them. They’ll burn right along with us or be ripped apart by the hungry mob eventually.
It should be illegal to drop people from their insurance. If insurance companies are incurring huge losses, they should sue the fossil fuel companies and then maybe there will be real action on climate change.
IIRC the fossil fuel companies & insurance providers have an ugly symbiotic relationship through stock shares for their respective profit margins. The YT channel A More Perfect Union may have addressed this on a recent FL housing insurance crisis & climate change story.
I feel very badly for every single person who has lost so much from these fires.
I need to say, being “house poor” is a choice. And it’s a choice the majority of the citizens don’t have the luxury to make.
You might be surprised to know, that the average person is 200.00 away from insolvency, so….. the majority of households ARE house poor.
Living in LA doesn’t make them special by that standard.
Minor question…isn’t it “house rich & cash poor” when someone owns a home of high value but has little money otherwise? Or perhaps I’ve been saying it wrong all these years!
My cousin and I had a discussion about this, re: Mandy Moore in specific He, MAGA, states it’s ridiculous for MM to share a GoFundMe for her inlaws when she’s worth millions.
I pointed out she most likely doesn’t have millions on hand. Her house (now gone) was part of her networth. Any valuable art on those walls (now gone) was part of her networth. She’s worth millions but most likely doesn’t have millions on hand.
So Spiedi, on paper, have/had assets that were the bulk of their net worth so they have a point there.
They let us know 6mo ago that they were leaving California. And a year ago we lost our car insurance for the same reason. We all knew this was happening. Insurance companies suck.
Insurance is a big pyramid scheme. In the midwest our home insurance went from $1200 in 2017 to $4700 in 2024 and we received notice it is going up again. The whole “shop around” defense is absurd, they all charge the same in zip codes. You have to weigh a reputable company/deductibles/coverages and make an expensive choice. I spent 37 hours going through companies and quotes this year over 2 months. We have never made a claim, but every hail storm and tornado in the state makes it increase regardless. I cannot afford to replace my home, if I sold it I don’t qualify for rentals in our area on my salary. So i have no streaming services, use a mobile MVNO, and go cheap on groceries. This country is only going to get worse.
I don’t know what’s going on with insurance in CA. But I do know that in FL, only small insurance companies offer new homeowners insurance now. Floridians pay 4x the national average for homeowners insurance. Flood insurance is separate and very few insurance companies sell that in FL. The few who can afford is get it from the Federal Government. It goes on and on…
Yes! Flood, earthquake and fire all separate additions. Roof coverage? that has a separate deductible all for itself. Ridiculous. But as long as the 1% in “government” are ok, who cares about the rest of the population.
If it’s one thing a recently opened K-9th G charter school revealed, it’s that the plastics problem & climate change [really anything] is “for someone else to deal with”. There are days when I walk past the fenced-in soccer field to see it littered w/ empty plastic water bottles even though there are recycling bins within reach for the students. The school is linked to a nearby church serving a high income bracket congregation & I’m a Doubting Thomas there’s any STEM initiatives to inspire these kids to develop any interest in solving the plastics problem/plague they are on track to inherit. As I type this, those empties left on the soccer pitch & kicked to the curb in the surrounding area will easily migrate to the network of storm drains engineered & built over 150yrs ago. And no one is drawing a link to single-use plastic with those “100Year Floods” now happening every 2-3Yrs. The Harvey Disaster in TX should have shed some light on this culprit, but the social trauma of that event pulled focus & in the aftermath, everyone just moved on.
.
Don’t get me started on the O&G PR scam that is their Houston “recycling facility” stuffed to the gills w/ collected single-use plastic waiting to be processed for Exxon. “Oh, these #s & colors need to be sorted? We’re not a sorting facility.” …Once again, that’s “someone else’s job”
CBS News | Long-delayed Houston recycling program sparking criticism of fossil fuel industry
I like Heidi and Spencer, they have grit and are survivors. I am so sorry for what they are going thru. So what if they are hustling. For most people in fast-paced cities, life is either an LA Hustle or a NY Grind. Besides, to survive a catastrophic event, you’ve got to hustle. Periodt.
I am impressed by H&S resilience in the face of such devastation. They dusted off the ashes, put on a nice scarf and got to work. I like that. I wish the same for all impacted by such loss.
State Farm stopped giving new policies in 2023. It announced in March 2024 that it was going to pull the old ones and sent notice at least 30 days prior to alert homeowners, giving homeowners time to find another carrier.
Everyone is making it out that State Farm has no conscience and that they dropped everyone one day without warning and that the next day the fire started.
Of course the sick, elderly and poor may take longer to find insurance or simply cant afford it, but everyone else had plenty of notice to find another provider.
Many of those who were dropped from their insurance had to obtain it through the state of California’s FAIR program. This program required that many modify their property to the extent of paying thousands to remove trees. It was a time consuming process.
My mortgage company requires homeowners’ insurance, so I’m assuming all of these people that don’t have insurance own their homes outright? I know that some people in Altadena had homes that were passed down from family, but for everyone else?