Give Your Home Owner’s Insurance a Checkup

This past weekend I had my car broken into. We lost a GPS, phone car charger, and my bowling bag with 2 balls, shoes, and braces. Seriously, who steals bowling balls? It was a pretty unfortunate weekend. After filing a police report, I went to check on my insurance to see what it would be covered by and if it was worth it to make a claim.

I wasn’t sure if it would be covered under the car insurance or my home owner’s insurance, but I was hoping for the car. Since I’ve been with my current insurance company for so long the car insurance deductible is down to $100 since I hadn’t made a claim yet. The home owner’s insurance deductible was $500. Wouldn’t you know it, stolen stuff falls under the home owner’s insurance.

So, unfortunately there wasn’t much point in making a claim, as all the things that were stolen added up to a little less than the deductible. My agent said there would be a good chance of my premium going up if I did, so I decided against putting the money towards our deductible. We aren’t going to replace everything right away anyways.

Now to the checkup part. While I was going through my policy, I noticed that while my total insurance level was fine, there are limits to how much I can get for certain categories. I’ll be honest, it isn’t something I really paid attention to when I first got the policy, as I didn’t have much of anything in the house. I was under all the limits easily. Some examples of categories that were there are:

Jewelry
Cameras
Guns
Tools
Silverware
Computers

Like I said, when I first got the policy I was easily under the limit for all of these categories. However, since then I have gone over in a few categories, and it never crossed my mind to raise the limits. Thankfully this served as a good reminder to check those out and see what the difference in premiums would be. I raised 2 categories by a few thousand, and the difference in premium is about $1.33 a month.

Hopefully I won’t ever need to collect on the insurance, but thankfully now if something were to happen it wouldn’t be as big of a problem as before. This served as a good reminder that I should probably check up on this at least once a year. If it has been longer than that for you you may want to give your policy a look.