Home insurance is not a topic that immediately springs to mind when you consider child care, but is really quite relevant when you think about it. The basic needs of any human, from infant to elderly, are food, water, clothing and shelter. Home insurance should be able to look after the shelter aspect should disaster strike your home.
Like earthquakes, disaster comes in several different magnitudes. Gauging your own personal Richter scale is in fact an essential assessment if you are to get the most value for money when purchasing home insurance from a provider like Santander. If you wouldn’t feel the need to replace an item that got chewed by your baby, it does not need to be insured.
Home owners will of course need the buildings element of home insurance cover, but as this is a prerequisite for most mortgages, we will not focus on this topic for long. The salient points to note are that you should think twice before taking the first policy offered, and should make sure that you do not underinsure your property. There can be few things worse than having to claim after a house fire and finding that your cover will not stretch to the cost of the re-build.
Underinsuring is not much of problem for most people when it comes to buildings insurance, however. Much more common is the problem of over insuring, and thus paying over the odds in regular home insurance premiums. This usually happens when the market value, rather than the resale value of the property is taken as the sum insured. In the event of a claim, this will not seem so much of a problem.
When it come to contents insurance, both over and underinsuring can be costly mistakes in the long run. Underinsuring the valuables in your home is quite an easy mistake to make, especially in the last few years thanks to the soaring value of gold. Many home insurance policies have a limit to the cover provided for individual items, and this can easily be breached, especially if you are the beneficiary of a generous Christmas. Additionally, items of jewellery that you have had for quite some time can have increased in value several times.
The cumulative value of your contents will of course be affected by the rising value of individual items, and to compound this, many people set the sum insured for contents too low to start with. Make full use of the power of the internet, and reassess the value of your contents with the help of one of the many online, room-by-room calculation tools now available. This way you can prevent both the disappointment of under insuring, and the inflated ongoing cost of over insuring your home.
