Except that your decisions to use substandard building materials could result in the destruction of other people's homes and wilderness that has nothing to do with your house, your money, or anything else.

you miss the point, and the concept! If I choose to leave wood siding and wood shingles on my home, which as a point of fact I have neither, and you choose to spend the money to replace your roof, siding and decks with non combustible materials, a conversion that will cost multiple tens of thousands of dollars. When a wild fire comes down the forest, my home will likely be destroyed, yours will be less likely to be destroyed. My choices will not effect you! Unless I'm the one that started the fire, The wild fire will burn what it's able to.

Here's a bit of information on wildfire damage and the impact of mitigation and building codes.

https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2 ... e-outcomes. The actual report itself is long and a tough read https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Techn ... N.1910.pdf

The Waldo Canyon fire in the foothills west of Colorado Springs is the best studied wildland urban interface wildfire in the U.S. and it showed that homes can be considered a collection of fuel to feed a fire. We can decide on the kind and quantity of fuel with our decisions on land use, zoning, building materials, and mitigation.

This was a NIST study finding about the Mountain Shadows area in the Waldo Canyon fire: ..."only 48 of the destroyed homes were ignited directly from the wildfire. Structure-to-structure spread from these early ignitions resulted in the cascading ignition of the other 296 destroyed homes."

It wasn't the wildfire itself that destroyed the majority of the homes in the Waldo Canyon fire. Burning homes provided the ignition source for neighboring homes. The decisions you make about your property will change wildfire outcomes for everyone around here.