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How To Save Money on Your Home Insurance

Published: January 28, 2014

How To Save Money on Your Home Insurance

When people come to arrange their home insurance, they often forget that what you’re basically dealing with is two key components within the policy. These are contents insurance and buildings insurance.

Overall, your home insurance policy is there to protect you, your dependents and your property. But insurance companies tend to make a distinction between you and your possessions, and the bricks and mortar of your property.

The best way to save money on your home insurance is ensure that your policy takes into account the two main components. You can of course separate them and you are not obliged to take one overall policy, but keeping them together will generally save money and make it easier keeping track on your admin.

Contents insurance offers the best opportunity to trim your costs. Now, you can’t do that much about where you live, so getting cover in inner City London is going to cost you more than a deserted Scottish island, but there are things you can do.

Before you approach an insurance company, take a quick look at what you have inside your house and make a detailed inventory of what you own. Most people underestimate the value of the contents of their homes, but it’s a bad idea to get this calculation wrong. You could argue that if you deliberately play down how many possessions you own, then you won’t have to pay more on your premium.

In the long run, this is false economy, because should you have a flood, be burgled, or suffer some major accident within the house, then the insurance company will not cover all the items lost, or damaged. If you consider how may computers, smartphones and televisions an average house has, plus then add in items such as jewellery and clothes, the replacement cost is usually significant.

So, get a detailed inventory drawn up. Once you have that, play the excess game. The cost of a premium can be significantly reduced if you are prepared to pay the first part of any claim. This requires some thought, but can reduced your premium significantly.

Another way to reduce the final bill with contents insurance is to show the insurance company that you have a secure property. Fitting recommended locks, window fittings and sensor-activated lights can demonstrate that you take security seriously, and you have significantly reduced the risk of say a break-in.

The best thing to do before buying a policy is to examine just where savings might be made (what you can do to make you, or your property, a better risk).

With buildings insurance, you have to get cover which covers the current rebuild cost not the market value (the price you bought it for, or what it would be worth if you sold it). Again, it pays to have a very firm idea of the rebuild cost of your house and whether you want the main structure only to be included, or whether you want boundary walls/fences, permanent fixings or improvements, outbuildings, or garages/greenhouses to be included.

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