Depending on your income, the kind of job you have, and the type of home that you have, your risk of being sued could be higher than you think.
If you’re at high risk of having a lawsuit thrown your way, you need to be prepared by knowing the average home insurance cost to pay for this type of thing.
To ensure that you get what you’re looking for in your insurance, do some investigating with the information below.
Here’s everything you need to know before you can calculate your home insurance cost.
Understand the Value
Finding the perfect home is a daunting task.
It takes forever to comb through everything on the market to find the right home for you and your family. Finding a starter home means finding something not too big but also that you don’t feel trapped inside.
The next step to do is to figure out what kind of insurance to get.
This is a step that exhausted people try to breeze through after running the gauntlet of just finding a place. However, you need to decide carefully, as much as you did with finding your house.
Home insurance payments are going to cost you over time, just like your mortgage. If you want to pay your premium out of your escrow account, that’s totally possible.
The right home insurance protects your investment.
Since a home is one of the biggest investment that the majority of people ever undertake in their life, it’s vital to take it seriously. A new home is going to degrade over time and protection against that, or any unforeseen events is what insurance is about.
Between climate change, vandals, and age, you’ve got a lot of potential enemies to the constitution of your home.
You need it to stay in great condition from top to bottom.
Don’t Cut Corners
When you’re thinking about how much to spend on your insurance premium, you might be tempted to choose the cheapest option.
However, that’s a bad way to look at home insurance. Your insurance policy is responsible for protecting your home, so you need a comprehensive plan that doesn’t cost you too much to activate.
Start by considering real dwelling protection to cover the structure of your home. This covers all the attached pieces including a porch or a garage.
Get enough dwelling protection to cover the cost of rebuilding your home should anything disastrous happen to it.
Then consider personal property protection to ensure you don’t have to buy all new stuff is something happens. This covers the amount of value that all the things you own have added up together.
Prepare to digitize and submit some photos, receipts, and proof that all of these things really belong to you.
Lastly, make sure you have adequate liability coverage to ensure that you don’t lose your home and your shirt if someone slips and falls. If a visitor or even a friend comes to your property and falls down, breaking their hip, you might be liable.
If you left a garden hose out for them to trip on, you’re suddenly liable for their injuries if you’re not covered.
Try Bundling
You have all kinds of insurance needs in the modern world. It’s very important to ensure that you’re covered when you’re driving your car, living in a house, or operating a business to ber protected.
If you need more than one type of insurance, you can call your company and bundle things together.
If they offer all the types of insurance that you need, you can have your policies bundled together.
This ensures you get a lower rate because you’re buying multiple policies and sending them more money than if you had just one policy.
More insurance companies are starting to tailor homeowners insurance to the needs of the policyholder.
There are so many complex combinations for bundling and saving, that you just need to talk to your agent to see what they offer.
You could save more with the right combination of three policies than you’d spend on one or two alone if you play your cards right.
If you have a family that’s all old enough to drive, expand your insurance to cover all the drivers in your family. Put your youngest driver on your oldest car to get a little more savings out of your policy. Look at all the options available before you sign on the dotted line.
Combine this with your home insurance cost and you’ll be shocked at the kind of savings that you’ll get.
See what a company like Clearsurance has to say about bundling.
Learn The Limits of Your Coverage
When you’re trying to understand how much home insurance coverage you need, you might think that some of the numbers are overblown.
Why would you need a million dollars in liability coverage anyway? That’s preposterous, right?
Well, it turns out, no, it’s not all that crazy. If you’re trying to cover your liability, someone could sue you for millions of dollars with a slip and fall and if you’re not covered, you’re screwed.
You don’t have to settle for the default coverage limits the insurance company offers you if you think you need more.
Some people need more coverage because they have more people coming through their home or they’re near a high traffic area.
You can increase and lower your coverage limit with just a phone call in most cases. If you’re traveling overseas and want to increase your liability while your housesitter stays over, that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Just make sure to lower it when you get home.
The Average Home Insurance Cost Varies
Depending on where you live, the average home insurance cost could be very different than it is a few miles away.
If you’re near a place that could become volatile during a natural disaster, your premium could be higher than a friend or neighbor.
If you’re thinking of taking on another real estate investment, check out our guide for more info.
Time to Buy, Mate! Why You Should Look into Real Estate Property Investments in Australia