Another Friday, another insurance tip for you, are you ready? Today, I’m going to give you a few tips on what you can do to make sure if you have a homeowners claim, things can run as smooth as possible.
Home Insurance Claim Advice
Nobody likes having issues when they file an insurance claim. So what’s something you can do to make sure you don’t have those difficult issues when something does happen to your house and you have to file a claim?
Make A Home Inventory List
One thing you can do, that a lot of people don’t do, is you can have an inventory of everything that you own in your house. Most home insurance companies don’t require you to have a home inventory list, however, it will make things run much, much smoother in the event you do have a claim. You can track what you have with pictures, receipts, appraisals, date of purchase, links online of where you bought it, the more information you have the better.
Then if you ever have a loss and have to file a claim, you can just hand this list right over to the claims adjuster in your job is done.
How Much Information Should You List?
You can go as big or as small as you like on this list. Obviously you can’t list everything down to the little toy horse that your kid has, but the more you do the easier it is, and probably the more payout you’re going to get on your personal property claim if and when that happens.
How Much Coverage Do You Need?
Making this list will also give you a good idea of the personal property coverage that you should have on your policy. It will give you a good idea of how much stuff you own, therefore how much coverage you need. Whereas if you don’t have this list, you may have no idea.
High Value Items
Something that is very important to point out, if you have any one piece of property that is very high value, I would say anything over $5,000, you need to make sure with your insurance company that it is covered. A lot of insurance companies have what they call special limits of liability, which means for certain things like guns, jewelry, art, collectibles, you’re only going to have a certain amount, usually only up to 2,500 or $5,000.
After that, it doesn’t matter how much personal property coverage you have, they’re not going to pay anything more for that specific piece of personal property. So if you have anything high value, call your insurance agent, tell them what it is and make sure you have enough coverage. And if you don’t, you’ll need to schedule that specifically as an endorsement onto your policy. So this is just one simple tip, something that you can do to save you time and to save you a headache if and when you ever have a home insurance claim.