Home insurance: Is your home properly insured?

It is estimated that about 6.5 million homes are underinsured. This potentially spells doom for many homeowners when they want to file a claim or even when you want to sell your home.  The truth is the consequences of not having the right cover for your home can be far reaching.

For instance, when you need to make a claim and you discover that your cover is inadequate; you will have no choice but make up for the difference. In the worst case scenario, you might end up with no cover at all. This can also be detrimental to your quest to sell your house.

Therefore, it is important to review your policy to ensure that you have the right level of cover. Some of the common issues that could affect your policy include the exclusion of certain valuables from the policy, over or under stating the cost of replacing your household goods or rebuilding your home, not making mid-term adjustments and going for the wrong type of insurance among other things.

 All these can potentially leave you with hefty bills to foot in the event that something happens. Thus, you need to ensure that you know what your insurance policy covers as well as the amount of money it will cost to replace your items.

This is vital to getting the right cover. Besides, prospective buyers will be more inclined towards buying a house that is sufficiently insured compared to one that is not.

A good comprehensive insurance will begin by calculating the worth of your items before working out at price that is able to cover the loss or damage to those items. Unfortunately, in most instances people underestimate the value of their home by close to 40 percent leading to a high number of those whose homes are underinsured. Here are some tips to ensure you are sufficiently covered:

Know what is covered and how to work the worth

Your home insurance should be able to cover not only the home but everything that you may want to take if you were to move houses. They include household goods namely appliances fridges, cookers, computers and televisions.

Furniture and furnishings such as curtains, bed, sofas and carpets and valuables like watches, jewelry, mobile phones, cameras as well as works of art and personal belongs that include clothes, bags and shoes should also be included.

Some insurance policies will cover cash, premium bonds, cheques and travel tickets when you are out of your home. However, you need to check this.

Establish the worth of the items covered by the policy

Although working out the value of your goods is a matter of common sense, the majority of people underestimate the value of their home by a huge percentage. Therefore, you will do well to go through each room in your home including the garage, loft as well as other outbuildings to make a comprehensive list of the items that are in the cover and their worth.

You also to take not of how much it would cost to replace them were you to shop for it today. What you get here should go together with what you would like the excess to be as well as the duration you are taking the cover for to come up with the price of your premium.

Items that are not covered in the insurance and what you need to do about it

Although most of the items in the home are covered, some are not. Thus, you may need to consider getting extra cover for antiques as well as rare objects. Additionally, you may need extra cover for those items that you take out of the house such as tablet computer, cash and cameras among other things.

Once you have done all these, you can then go back to your policy to see that it captures all the items you listed. Thus, you could simply ask the insurer to give you a re-quote of get quotes from difference insurers.

As a home owner you need to ensure that you are fully aware of what is covered so that you do not end up with an expensive repair bill that you believed was covered when you want to sell your house fast. Ultimately, as a home owner you need to ensure that you have your house covered for just about everything including those things you have no control over such as floods.