If your house is damaged in a fire, hurricane, flood or other disaster, you should call your insurance company first thing. But after that, call your local appraiser’s office.

If you do, the value of your property could be reduced appreciably in the tax man’s eye, and as a result, your property tax could go down significantly. If you don’t, “your house could be assessed as if it were in normal condition, despite thousands in diminished market value,” says Patrick O’Connor, president of O’Connor and Associates, one of the country’s largest tax consulting firms.

For example, in the Houston area, a call to the appropriate taxing authority by someone whose house was damaged by Hurricane Harvey won’t change this year’s tax bill because it is based on property values as of Jan. 1, 2017 -- before the big flood. But next year’s appraisals will be based on values as of Jan. 1, 2018, which means next year’s appraisals will reflect damage from Harvey.

Reporting the damage before the date of valuation will give owners a chance to ensure their property value is based on the impact of the disaster, says O’Connor, with the result being a lower value notice and a lower point to begin negotiations for a tax reduction.

Say the house was worth $500,000 before the flood, but is now worth $230,000 because of damage from the disaster. If the county appraiser knows that, he or she can reduce the valuation appropriately. But if he or she isn’t aware -- and most local tax officials don’t visit every house in their districts every year -- your tax bill will be based on the value before the flood, rather than after.

O’Connor says most people are unaware that they can cut their tax bills if their homes are damaged during a disaster such as the Northern California fires, or the hurricanes that blasted the Gulf Coast, much of Florida and all of Puerto Rico. But they can do so, if they are proactive.

Each of the country’s thousands of counties and cities has its own system for valuing property. When disaster strikes, some take the bull by the horns on assessing damage; others don’t have the resources, so they rely on self-reporting. Whether your taxing agency is on the ball or not, O’Connor says you should call just the same to make sure it is aware your place has lost value.

Incidently, some states, including Texas, require that when you put a previously flooded house on the market, you must tell would-be buyers of that fact.

To obtain the most relief, owners usually need to document the condition of their houses when they suffered damage and again at year’s end, when they should report what repairs have been made (if any) and what still needs to be done.

The downside to this, of course, is that there’s a good possibility that after you rebuild, you could end up with a higher assessed value. If you upgraded the place after a flood with new appliances, cabinets, flooring and so on, it is going to be worth more than before the disaster.

Also, whether you were insured or not when the tornado, hurricane or flood struck, you may be eligible for a federal income tax refund as a result of the damage. “Getting a refund is going to be the fastest way most people can get cash to rebuild,” O’Connor advises.

An IRS provision called Section 165 allows for a deduction as a result of casualty losses. That can include shipwrecks, plane crashes and train wrecks, as well as the more common disasters that cause a rapid change in value.

Generally, according to the IRS, you can deduct casualty and theft losses relating to your home, household items and vehicles on your federal income tax return if they are related to a federally declared disaster. But you can’t write off such losses if they are covered by insurance -- unless you file a timely claim for reimbursement and you reduce the loss by the amount of any reimbursement or expected reimbursement.

If your property is personal-use property or isn’t completely destroyed, the amount of your casualty loss is the lesser of the adjusted basis of your property, or the decrease in fair market value.

“Casualty losses are generally deductible in the year the casualty occurred,” reads a page on the topic at IRS.gov. “However, if you have a casualty loss from a federally declared disaster that occurred in an area warranting public or individual assistance (or both), you can choose to treat the casualty loss as having occurred in the year immediately preceding the tax year in which the disaster happened, and you can deduct the loss on your return or amended return for that preceding tax year.”

Back to that example above: The house was worth $500,000 but now is worth just $230,000. That gives the owner a $270,000 tax deduction that can be used on the 2017 federal tax return or on last year’s return.

If you elect to amend your 2016 return, says O’Connor, you can get a significant refund “in about a month.” Assuming the owner in this example is in the 25 percent tax bracket, the $270,000 deduction would generate a $65,000 refund, he says.

Another way to get cash quickly is a loan from the Small Business Administration (SBA). Normally, the SBA makes loans to businesses, but after a named disaster, it makes low-interest loans -- currently 1.75 percent amortized over 30 years -- to individuals as well.

O’Connor says, “it is not possible to find such attractive terms from traditional lenders.”

Loans to individuals are capped at $200,000 for rebuilding and $40,000 for personal property such as autos, clothing and tools. Unlike a tax refund, though, the SBA loan must be repaid.

More than 1 million senior homeowners have now taken out reverse mortgages. There’s a good chance you might, too, once you reach age 62. But the question of how to use the money from the loan is just as important as the question of whether or not to get the loan in the first place.

A laundry list of celebrity spokespeople have tried to explain how these “backwards” loans work. Here’s how the most recent one -- gravelly voiced actor Tom Selleck -- explains it in a commercial for a reverse lender: “A reverse mortgage loan is a simple idea really -- you turn your home’s equity into cash and you pay it back when you leave the house.”

Reverse mortgages are making a comeback from their hottest years in 2007, ‘08 and ’09, when more than 100,000 loans were made every year. According to the National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association (NRMLA), 45,000 of these home equity conversion mortgages have been recorded so far in fiscal 2017, most of them through the Federal Housing Administration.

That tips the total to over 1 million since the first ones were originated back in 1990. There’s a good bit of equity to tap, too: NRMLA puts total equity for homeowners 62 and older at $6.3 trillion as of the first quarter of this year.

How much can you get with this type of loan? It depends on a number of factors, but it could be as much as 50 percent of the built-up equity in your home.

What to do with the money? You could always take it to Vegas and bet it all on red. But there are a lot of better ways to use the proceeds. NRMLA recently devoted an issue of its magazine, Reverse Mortgage, to the topic. They advertised 25 ways to use your home equity, with a few extra ideas thrown in for good measure.

NRMLA members were asked by the magazine how their clients put their money to use. Many of the answers are pretty obvious: Pay down debt, replace a salary, pay off a first mortgage, send a grandchild to college. But others are pretty clever.

One of the biggest fears about reverses is that they are just another way for the bank to repossess your house. Or as Selleck puts it, “Like you, I thought that reverse mortgages had to have some kind of catch -- just a way for banks to get your house. Right?”

They’re not, as the commercial assures. But in fact, foreclosures are possible with reverse mortgages if the owner-borrower doesn’t maintain the property or pay the taxes and insurance. So one use for the money is to create a set-aside fund to pay the taxes and insurance.

“One of the heaviest burdens for older homeowners is paying property taxes and insurance,” notes Jon Maiolatesi, a loan officer with 1st Financial Reverse Mortgages in Michigan. He describes an older couple living on Social Security: “The monthly budget was tight, but they made it work from month to month. However, twice a year when the property tax and insurance bills arrived, there was often not enough in the checking account to cover them.”

When the couple pursued a reverse mortgage, they found they could arrange for a Life Expectancy Set-Aside (LESA) to pay the taxes and insurance. Funding the LESA does reduce the balance of funds available to you immediately, but it also prevents foreclosure.

Here’s another smart idea: People who take out reverse mortgages generally want to stay in the house a long time, since they have to repay the loan once they move out (or once the home is no longer their principal residence). So why not use the proceeds to redesign your living space to make it responsive to your needs as you age?

Pete Mendenhall, a sales director at Liberty Home Equity Solutions in Coppell, Texas, tells of a widow whose home needed a lot of repairs, even before it could be retrofitted for things like grab-bars and wider doorways.

“Universal design updates allowed (the client) to live more comfortably, with increased wheelchair mobility, and to age in place with dignity. Universal design and other types of upgrades would also help with resale value when the time comes.”

Proceeds can also be used to build living space for an aging parent or a caretaker. You can even use the money to buy a new home.

Dennis Loxton, a sales manager with Liberty in Fort Wayne, Indiana, says one of his borrowers used her equity to do what’s called a “HECM for Purchase.” The borrower used a Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) on the new home to provide 50 percent of its purchase price. The balance was paid in cash from the proceeds of the sale of her existing house plus other assets, so there were “no monthly repayments thereafter,” said Loxton.

-- Freelance writer Mark Fogarty contributed to this report.

Would you buy a mortgage from Kevin Costner?

This isn’t quite a rhetorical question. The Academy Award-winning actor and director is the lead investor in a new venture in the mortgage space called Lender Price. The Pasadena, California-based firm doesn’t make loans, but supplies key technology that figures out how much you’ll be charged for a mortgage.

And Costner joins a surprisingly long line of celebrities involved in the mortgage business. The list includes the current president of the United States, who migrated over to the home loan field after making his fortune in real estate. But there are many actors and sports figures who have made the jump after they achieved celebrity.

Are celebs just figureheads, or do they really know something about housing finance?

Costner talks a pretty good game. He made an appearance at last year’s Mortgage Bankers Association’s annual conference, and says Lender Price has a “vision and strategy for mortgage lending transformation through a technologically superior digital POS and PPE platform that offers unprecedented business analytics.”

While that statement sounds as though it was written by the company’s marketing director, the jargon was pretty much absent during a one-on-one conversation.

“The mortgage industry is eager to embrace the promise of digital disruption, and Lender Price is strategically positioned to fulfill on that promise,” said Costner during an interview. “For an investor like me, who wants to be in on the early stages of a business poised to transform an industry that is critical to the U.S. economy and touches the lives and financial aspirations of millions of citizens, Lender Price is ideally positioned.”

President Donald Trump’s real estate background is famous. What is less commonly known is that he launched a mortgage brokerage company -- Trump Mortgage (what else?) -- just before the mortgage market imploded.

According to an analysis in the Washington Post, his venture folded after just 18 months in business. Among other things, its spring 2006 launch was a case of bad timing. The market tanked in the fall of 2008. And what was even more untimely was that his product line included subprime mortgages.

Trump didn’t really have any hands-on impact on the business, but it was a failure nonetheless.

Mortgages, of course, are a pretty logical hop for a real estate mogul like the president. Most often, you can’t sell a house without financing.

Other celeb housing connections often make sense as well -- after a closer look. For example, Academy Award-nominated actor Edward Norton has shown an active interest in affordable housing. That’s not surprising when you factor in that his grandfather was James Rouse, a towering figure in the field of affordable housing. Rouse was the creator of Columbia, Maryland -- arguably the country’s most successful planned community -- and the founder of the nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners.

Enterprise has been responsible for creating half a million affordable units since its inception. Norton actually worked in the company’s New York office for two years, and has been a director of the firm since 1998. He is now a lifetime trustee.

Some celebrities actually start their own housing businesses. Former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach is one. He launched The Staubach Company, a commercial real estate firm, in 1977. Now he is executive chairman of another real estate firm, JLL Americas, a company that took in $3.6 billion in revenue in 2011.

Trade publication National Real Estate Investor recently went looking for celebrities investing in commercial real estate, and it found a baker’s dozen of them. They include former New York Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez, former tennis great Andre Agassi, and actors Brad Pitt and George Clooney.

Some mortgage firms hire celebs as spokespeople. Sports figures are especially popular in this role; stars like Reggie Jackson, Jim Palmer and Ozzie Smith can be seen at mortgage meetings around the country. One of the most popular endorsers was racecar driver Danica Patrick, who represented subprime lender Argent Mortgage years ago. At one industry meeting, some 800 mortgage execs stood in line to have their pictures taken with the racing star, who smiled for every photo.

As a side note, your intrepid columnist was once given the opportunity to race against Patrick in a video game. We sat side by side in mockup racecars with accelerator pedals and game screens in front of us. She beat the pants off of me, but softened the blow with the gift of a signed copy of her autobiography and a personally autographed hat.

And of course, besides athletes, any number of actors have served as spokespeople for mortgage companies. Actors of a certain age, in particular, have helped market reverse mortgages to seniors. Robert Wagner, Henry Winkler, Fred Thompson and Tom Selleck have all hyped these loans, which allow people to remain in their homes until they pass on or move out without having to make monthly payments.

-- Freelance writer Mark Fogarty contributed to this report.