Home Insurance: Basic Information

Whether it is your first home or maybe your fifth home, you want to make sure that you have adequate home insurance on your home. When you buy a home there are certain levels of coverage that is mandated by mortgage companies and the bank but their levels may not cover everything that you should have covered. Make sure that you additional coverage for earthquakes, if applicable, flood insurance, and windstorm damage. You need to make sure that when you have home insurance that it not only covers your home, but also your possessions that are in the house, and any out buildings like your garage and the contents in there.

When you apply for home insurance there will be many factors that are used in determining how much your premiums will be. They will take in what age your home is, where your home is located, how many square footage, the materials that were used to build your home, and how far it is from a fire hydrant.

The next thing that you need to consider when getting home insurance is just how much it would cost to replace your personal property.

There will be two classifications of property which is one type of property that will be valued at the actual case value and the type of property that will be valued at what it costs to replace it. When it comes to homeowners polices they will automatically cover all your household contents, which include furniture, clothes, appliances, and more that will be replaced up to forty percent of the amount that your home is insured for. If you do not feel that this covers all your household contents then you can add more coverage for a higher premium.

The type of policy that has replacement costs will give you more protection than a policy that has actual cash value coverage. This is a great policy for the simple fact that if a burglar comes and steals your ten year old television if you had an actual cash value policy you would only get paid what you would usually pay for a ten year old television. If you had the replacement coverage cost policy you would get a newer television that is similar to the one that was stolen.

Before you tell the insurance company how much you want for personal property coverage, you should make an inventory of all your personal property by writing them down with general information about the item such as a serial number if there is one and the value. This may be time consuming, but you will have a correct inventory of everything that you have because after a disaster it is nice to know what you had because if it is a tornado your stuff could have blown away and without the list you might forget something that you had.

Another thing that you need to know about home insurance is that the higher your deductible the lower your premiums. If the insurance company does not have to pay a large amount on a claim you will see a lower monthly premium.