Carrickfergus Advertiser - Features - Does Your Home Insurance Have You Covered?

Features

Does Your Home Insurance Have You Covered?

Thursday, 9 December 2010

Home insurance is rather like a visit to the dentist. We try to forget about it for the vast majority of the year; we may consider it and deal with it once every 12 months, but that is all. We do not give it a great deal of thought and we assume that things will be OK as they have been in the past.

Just like the dentist however, it is only when things go wrong that we wish that perhaps we had paid a little more attention to the finer details and checked that what we were doing suited our current requirements.

It is a little strange to consider that many people will search the Internet, using a comparison website perhaps, to find the best possible deal for their bike or car insurance cover online. However, when it comes to home insurance, many people just agree to renew their existing policy for another 12 months.

It is worth remembering that unlike an online motorcycle insurance quote, for example, which tends to be renewed on the same vehicle each year, your home insurance and particularly the contents will often change a great deal from one year to the next.

Therefore, making sure you are adequately covered in the event of an incident is vital to ensure that you are not left footing the bill, simply because you did not have the time or inclination to update your current policy when it was up for renewal.

So, before we give you tips on how to find the best UK home insurance to suit you, let us look at what home insurance is and why it is a vital consideration for the modern homeowner.

Home insurance is the umbrella term for two forms of home insurance. The two elements of the insurance are buildings and contents insurance. Buildings insurance is a form of cover afforded by the insurance broker that will meet the total cost of the reconstruction of your home should it be irreparably damaged. This is the most basic requirement of home insurance, to ensure that should your house be severely damaged in any way, then the insurer will meet the cost of its reconstruction.

Indeed, so important is buildings insurance nowadays that many mortgage lenders will insist that customers have this form of cover in place before they lend them any money towards the purchase of the property.

In addition to covering bricks and mortar, buildings insurance also covers other permanent fixtures both in the home and outside it. Plumbed-in bathroom furniture is often covered as are other items that cannot be removed from the home. Outbuildings, such as sheds and garages, are also usually covered, though it is always wise to check this is the case on your policy.

Contents insurance, on the other hand, is a form of policy that covers the other non-fixed items in your home. This includes items such as your personal effects, electrical equipment, kitchen appliances, furniture, clothes, jewellery and sporting equipment.

It is worth checking on the policy if the home contents insurance covers you for items that you may use outside of the home. For example, if you have sporting equipment you use elsewhere, or electrical equipment such as satellite navigation systems for the car. This is particularly important, especially if your car insurance does not cover these items.

It is also worth noting that expensive personal possessions may need to be specified on your policy, which may incur a small additional levy on your home contents insurance.

Having understood why we need home insurance and what it consists of, we can now turn our attention to finding the best possible deal for our home insurance, but with a cautionary warning as to what the term 'best possible deal' actually means.

Certainly, the best way to retrieve a list of home insurance quotes is to head to an online comparison website, enter your details and see what it can retrieve from its lengthy list of insurance companies. It is tempting to think that the cheapest policy is necessarily the best value, but is that always the case?

It is always wise to look at several quotations from different providers to ensure that the level of cover it is offering matches what you need. For example, if you are looking at the buildings insurance aspect of your home policy, how much has the company stated it would cost to rebuild your house from scratch? Does the amount specified accurately reflect the total rebuild value?

Another issue to consider is the excess fee for any claim made, particularly on your contents insurance. The sad fact is that items do get lost, damaged, broken or stolen and there will come a time when you will need to use your contents insurance. However, you can then find that because you opted for the cheapest policy without really looking at the finer details, you have to bare a hefty excess charge towards any claim, running into hundreds of pounds.

With a little searching around for quotations and checking the finer points of each policy, you can ensure that you not only get the level of cover you require for your home insurance, but also that the excess fees are minimal. In addition, you can be sure that specific items you need insuring are covered and that the total cost of a home rebuild reflects the true value of such reconstruction should the worst ever happen.

Sometimes, finding the best deal for home insurance is not about finding the cheapest price from a comparison website, but looking at the finer points of your policy. If you do that every time you are due for renewal, then just like that trip to the dentist, you can save yourself a lot of pain in the future!