Choosing the correct Home insurance

Home insurance

Whether you want to insure your home, yourself or your car, it’s always best to find the cheapest deal, right?  Well, no actually. Insurance is not the same as buying a tangible asset where it is easy to compare like for like features.

With Home insurance there are added complications because you can get quotes for either a specific sum assured or a ‘blanket cover’ quote. A blanket policy works on the number of bedrooms and the area. So you might buy a three bedroom house and a blanket quoted policy covers you up to £1,000,000 even though you paid much less for the house. The temptation here is to assume what you paid is what you need to be insured for like you do with a car. It doesn’t work that way when it comes to insuring a house with the insurance value often different to its value. By choosing the value yourself, you would also need to increase the sum insured each year to keep pace with inflation. In fact, it has recently been estimated that 6.8 million homes in the UK are under insured due to policies that are not index linked or increased as they should be.

Choose your sum assured wrongly and you are in danger of being under insured if you make a claim meaning the insurer will downgrade your claim or not pay out at all.

Insurance companies are out to make a profit, it is how business works. Charging less to attract new customers is often a way to gain new business. To compensate, renewal premiums often shoot up to catch out the many amongst us who chose the easy option of staying with who we know. Also, finding ways not to pay out in the event of a claim is also good for a profit driven organisation, ‘underinsuring’ as an easy option for an insurer to use as their excuse.

There are several reasons why we would recommend you consider reviewing your home insurance with us:

• We only quote companies who provide top rated five star cover.
• We only quote companies who provide ‘blanket cover’ which greatly reduces the risk of being under insured.
• We only quote companies whose renewals premiums are guaranteed not to increase by more than 5% each year.

For more information, call Nikki on 01603 750004