Home Insurance

Help With Contents Insurance

Assessing the contents of your house

When you are deciding upon your contents insurance cover as part of home insurance, you will need to put some thought into just how much protection you need.

This may not be as easy as it sounds and some useful tips may be of benefit!

Underestimating

How many times have you heard someone say, "we have nothing worth stealing"?

However sincerely they may mean it, it's an odds-on certainty that a thief or burglar will not agree with them. If you are burgled, you can bet money on the fact that the thieves will find something, somewhere, to steal and subsequently sell.  Nor it is just criminal activity that could put your possessions and fittings at risk.

You may think you have little or nothing of value but if you have to go out and start buying replacements for your items that were damaged or destroyed following say a flood or fire, then very quickly your chequebook is going to tell you otherwise - unless you have the right level home insurance cover to fall back on.

We offer a policy that is specifically designed to provide you with the protection you need but, of course, you need to tell us certain things about your possessions and the value of insurance you think is necessary.

It is surprisingly easy to very significantly underestimate the value of your items. It's also not difficult to completely forget about an item or several items when you are ‘totting up' the value of your home contents.

Avoiding underestimation

There is no set way to get this right because everybody is different and what works for some people may not work well for others. Yet we have found that one technique is often useful and that is called ‘the room checklist'

• Make a list of the rooms of your house - remembering things such as annexes, basements, lofts and conservatories.
  
  
• Under each room name, make a list of things that typically exists in that room. That may include say for ‘Kitchen' things such as knives, kitchen tools, machinery etc. In the case of the ‘Loft' you may say ‘trunks and contents' etc. Perhaps in the ‘Bedroom' you may have an entry for jewellery and under ‘Dining Room' perhaps things such as cutlery and silver ornaments etc.
  
  
• When completed, take your list and use it as a checklist as you carry out an inventory of your house, room-by-room.
  

The key objective is to make sure that firstly you don't forget a room and secondly that you don't forget something that is in a room. On your walk-about, plan to spend 10-15 minutes in each room making sure that you open every drawer and box to have a quick-look inside.

You will probably find that several times during this process you'll exclaim, "I'd forgotten about that".

Against each item, write down how much it would cost to replace it. If in any doubt, a few minutes' research on the internet should tell you what its approximate replacement cost would be.

Remember, this needs to include everything that is not part of the building structure or a fitting. It needs to include things such as beds, bedsheets, linen, TVs, DVD players, tools, books - in fact everything that you'd expect your home insurance to take care of.

Summing the results

If you conduct this exercise correctly, it may take you an hour or more depending upon the size of your property. Yet it may be an hour or two very well invested in terms of getting the home insurance protection you need.

Once you sit down and look at your list of items by room with their values alongside, you may be surprised at just how much it would cost you to reinstate your home if it was significantly damaged by a disaster or emptied by a thief.

This is the value you need to discuss with us as part of your home insurance policy.