3 Home Insurance Tips To Ensure You Cover What’s Important
No one wants anything bad to happen to their home, but if something does go wrong, you want to be sure that your home is properly protected with the right home insurance coverage.
Many homeowners who get home insurance never review the fine print with their agent. The team at Dumfries Mutual Insurance highly recommends that you review your coverages with your agent to make sure that you have the right type of coverage to protect what’s important to you.
Here are 3 home insurance tips (in the form of questions) to ensure you cover what’s important for your home:
What kind of rebuilding coverage is on your home insurance plan?
Whether you’re a first-time homebuyer or a homeowner who has been in your home for many years, it can be tricky to determine exactly how much home insurance coverage you need.
We recommend using the Consumer Report’s rule of thumb: Buy enough insurance to cover the labour and materials to completely rebuild your home. This is called the Replacement Value or Replacement Cost.
Guaranteed Replacement Cost will ensure that your home is rebuilt to the standard it was before the damage occurred. If your home does not qualify for Guaranteed Replacement Cost, you can still purchase Plus coverage to account for annual inflation to help offset increased cost of materials and labour.
Do you have enough insurance coverage?
Guaranteed Replacement Cost is available to most homes built from 1960 or later. This type of coverage ensures that your home is rebuilt the way it was before the damage occurred.
Combined Limit Endorsement (more commonly known as Single Limit) may also be available. This type of coverage ensures that there will be enough funds available to cover reparations.
For example: If your home insurance policy limit is $500,000, your detached private structures are $50,000, your personal property is $350,000, and your additional living expenses are $100,000. You would have a Combined Limit Endorsement of $1,000,000. This means that if your home’s roof and pool shed suffer damage in a windstorm, the available coverage would be the $1,000,000 (the combined limit). In this example, if your pool shed costs more than $50,000 to repair, there would be available funds to complete the repair by “borrowing” from the other limits.
Do you know what is included in your home insurance?
Are your jewelry or musical instruments covered? Do you have collections that require additional coverage? Your policy will include special limits on some types of personal property, such as these. There are many add-ons that can be included in your home insurance coverage, but they can only be added if your agent knows about them. A home inventory assists in this process.
You can also purchase Home Systems Protection Coverage, which is a unique plan to protect homeowners’ home systems and appliances, from furnaces to hot tubs, for much less than the cost of individual extended warranty plans.
It’s very important to discuss all your inclusions, and what’s really important to you, so you can be properly protected.
On the flip side, all home insurance policies will have excluded perils. So it’s equally important to ask your agent about what isn’t covered in your policy.
No one wants surprises when making a home insurance claim. We hope that you’ve found these 3 home insurance tips helpful, and we recommend that you set up an appointment with our team to review your home insurance policy and options today. We will help you get the protection you need.