Insurance World

Protecting Your Home

Homeowner insurance is a must, of course, if you own your home. All homeowners realize that, but it’s not always easy to determine the right dollar amount of homeowner insurance you should have for adequate protection.

Homeowner Insurance is designed to offer you the financial wherewithal to rebuild if you’re faced with natural or other disaster such as fire, flood, hurricane, tornado, earthquake or terrorism. Unfortunately all too often homeowner policyholders realize far too late that they haven’t adequate homeowner insurance coverage to help them get back to their customary way of life.

If you have homeowner insurance, renters insurance, or insurance on your condominium that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re fully protected from any unforeseen disaster or tragedy. Though the percentage varies by study, third party research reports have determined that between half and three fourths of homeowners in the U.S. have underinsured their primary residence.

You should periodically meet with your homeowner insurance agent and review your homeowner policy, taking into consideration the current replacement value of your home and the goods and property covered under your policy. Since you first purchased your homeowner insurance, your requirements for coverage might have changed, the value of your home most probably has increased in value, or you might have made significant purchases and improvements that now need to be added to your homeowner coverage.

Your homeowner insurance policy does add a small annual inflation cost to the policy which, all things being the same, would be adequate. If, however, you’ve remodeled, reheated, added on a deck , patio or pool, or refinished your attic or basement, your house will have realized a significant value increase. You’ll almost certainly need a new assessment so that should a disaster occur you can replace what you’ve lost.

Should disaster such as tornado, floor or fire befall your home, your homeowner policy could have a ceiling on the dollar figure they will reimburse you. A homeowner general casualty policy, for example, that is endorsed to replace the cost of the building, the insurance carrier is pledged to pay up to 125 percent of the home’s valuation. If, in this example, the house is insured at $200,000, the homeowner policy will reimburse the homeowner $250,000. If you’ve underinsured your home you may end up holding the bag for the remainder of the replacement costs.

If your home is a costly upscale property you may want to think about a homeowner policy feature that guarantees coverage up to home replacement value. Many insurance firms offer this upscale homeowner policy feature.

Consider too that while your home may not have increased in value beyond the automatically inflated homeowner policy valuation your possessions may well have done so. You may have added expensive electronics or furs, or may have high value personal items whose value increases with age, such as jewelry, and coin or stamp collections.

One important money saving factor in the cost of your homeowner policy is that most insurance carriers give 2 to 15 percent discounts on homeowner safety and security equipment and products such as dead bolts, grates on windows, and smoke or burglar alarms. Securing your home, however, must take personal safety into consideration. What you don’t want to do is develop such a homeowner fortress that you cannot escape in the event of a fire or another in-home emergency.

Burglars are most likely to avoid your home however, if you light it up, if breaking into your home is time consuming or noisy. In fact, homeowner research has proven that burglars do not attempt to break into houses that would take them more than five minutes to enter.

Understanding insurance policies calculation is not that hard if you know few basic points. Collision, Comprehensive, Bodily Injury Liability and Property Injury Liability these are the key point you need to understand completely.
You’ll think appropriate Collision Coverage when you require repairs or replacements for your vehicle when it collides with another vehicle or property. If you are at fault for collision, then still it would be an accident, as no doubt you’d plan to run into that, but how much money you would be able to pay out of pocket for repairs? Just like other kinds of insurance, you’d have to pay that deductible amount first and then the insurance company would pay for all other charges for the repair.

Other term to become familiar with is Comprehensive Coverage. This is the kind of coverage that pays for damages caused by falling objects, certain natural disasters, fire, theft and vandalism. Deductibles work the same way as with Collision; the more out of pocket costs to you, the lesser will be your insurance premium.

In addition to knowing how much Collision and Comprehensive coverage you have, you’ll need to know about your liability coverage. Suppose you rear-end another driver. Or your foot slips off the brake onto the gas pedal and you plow down a mailbox. Your liability coverage will kick in and pay for the damages that you caused with your insured vehicle. You liability coverage will, or could, include bodily injury (people) and property damage.

You do not want to go without Bodily Injury Coverage. If you were at fault in an accident and others involved needed to go to the hospital and/or lost wages from missing work, those costs would come out of your pocket if you are not insured with Bodily Injury Coverage. It doesn’t take a genius to know how quickly those amounts can add up. This type of coverage can also help you in the event the other party takes legal action against you. Many states require you to carry Bodily Injury Coverage.

The other part of liability includes Property Damage coverage. Can you imagine how much it might cost should you accidentally drive into the side of someone’s home? You wouldn’t want to be caught without property damage insurance should you need to pay for repairs to another vehicle, building or anything else you might hit. As with Bodily Injury coverage, Property Damage coverage also helps protect you in the event of a related lawsuit.

Every policy will have its limits and various degrees of coverage. It’s important that you understand the basics of what you are paying for and why it is necessary. No one plans for an accident, be prepared!