Insurance World

The best homeowner insurance is the insurance that best meets your needs. The insurance shopper that takes the time to understand the basic elements of home insurance will have much more confidence and sense of satisfaction when making an insurance purchase. The homeowner policy has been around for a long time and so most of us have a general concept on how the policy works. The more you know about the market value of your home and the approximate cost to rebuild it the better off you will be when shopping for the homeowner policy.

This kind of knowledge is the foundation for determining what kind of policy to purchase. The age of your home has a direct bearing on the market value. The older homes built in the 1900’s have much lower market values today because most of them have depreciated. The market value for an older Victorian style home may be $50,000 but the actual cost to rebuild that home may be $200,000. The older homes that depreciate in market value are insured with actual cash value policies. They are often called market value policies. These policies will reimburse you for the market value of your home when there is a total loss. The market value policy is the best homeowner policy for the older home that has depreciated.

The replacement cost policy is better designed for newer homes or homes under construction. The replacement cost of a home and the market value are almost the same. Replacement cost is applied to the dwelling and most often to the contents of the dwelling. Replacement cost will repair or replace any loss with like kind and quality of materials without depreciation.

The best homeowner insurance for you will be determined by the age and market value of your home. The discounts for older and newer homes are the same. The protective device discount for deadbolt locks, smoke detectors, and fire extinguisher apply to both types of policies. Fire and burglar alarm systems are additional discounts that could be applied to both older and newer homes. Check our recommended insurers for more details.

You can buy pretty much everything over the Internet these days and this most certainly applies to insurance. But the process of buying something over the telephone or Internet means that you do not have the benefit of having a person in front of you to explain something in depth if you do not understand.

Another thing is that as a growing number of people begin to start buying products online, there are new problems that occur – teething problems shall we say that keep cropping up as more companies start offering services over the Internet for the first time.

With complex insurance policies like Critical Illness Insurance, a type of insurance where sometimes people do not fully understand exactly what they are buying, it is an area that could become a problem.

The Association of British Insurers thinks so anyway, which is why the organisation is improving the standards of the insurance application process via the telephone or the Internet for different types of health and protection policies, including those for critical illnesses.

A spokesman for the ABI, says: “Because the mechanics are slightly different when you are applying for a policy on the internet, you need to look at that process slightly separately and that is what we are doing at the moment. It is a piece of work that is on-going and it will improve the application process for telephone and Internet applications.”

The ABI’s spokesperson explain that it is not exactly that there have been problems with people buying medical policies like Critical Illness Insurance over the internet before, but the new standards will simply just recognise that buying a financial product over the internet means that financial companies have to change the way they collection personal information.

“It is more a recognition that we need to translate the new good practise that we have put in place on paper to the online and telephone application process. The methods of collecting the information are subtley different,” the ABI said.

The move to improve standards for buying health insurance policies for things like critical illness on line comes after the ABI this year launched various measures to make the steps to buying health policies simpler for both consumers and financial advisers. The organisation also updated guidance specifically for Critical Illness Insurance, offering guidelines on how to bring more clarity to application forms. The entire overhaul of personal medical insurance guidelines meant improvements to the leaflets offering advice on Critical Illness Insurance, the removal of ‘memory test’ questions like ‘have you been to a doctor in the last five years?’and clear warnings on application forms about the consequences if you do not reveal pre-existing medical conditions. The changes came after speaking with cancer charities and other organisations. It was hoped that the guidance would reduce the likelihood that a claim would be declined for non-disclosure of a pre-existing medical condition.

The ABI’s spokesperson said, “Having put in place what we believe to be higher standards of clarity on the application form, we clearly want to apply those higher standards to all forms of underwriting application.”

The work being carried out by the Association for online applications is still work in progress. And it is still unclear when the new standards will be released. But regardless of the time frame, it is certain that they will definitely be released soon.