Surprising stuff you can make a home insurance claim for
A friend spills red wine in your carpet. Where do you turn?
- Blot, grab the stain remover, and clean.
- Open the bottle of cheap white wine and pour over the stain, then blot.
- Blot, clean, and call your home insurance company to create a claim.
Home insurance covers damage, losses and theft to your house, in addition to gives you liability coverage in case someone injures themselves on your property. But did you know that you can claim quite a bit on your property insurance beyond damage brought on by fire, water damage, and theft?
We're not making up that red-wine-carpet-spill claim. Adhere to what they do that.
“A property insurance policy is written on what is known as an extensive form,” says LowestRates.ca COO, Dave Dyer. “And comprehensive means everything's included except what is understood to be excluded, such as overland and basement flooding, unless you've bought an endorsement. [But] accidents by most people are covered.”
Depending around the situation, says Dyer, you might like to put in a home insurance claim for damage to your carpet caused by a spill. If you've done your best to deal with the stain but it still won't emerge, you might have to exchange the entire carpet. That might lead to you needing to replace all the carpet in your house if you've tried on the extender throughout and can't have an exact or good-enough match. That can become very expensive to cover out of pocket.
Frozen food spoilage and surprise thunderstorms
Do guess what happens else is included by your property insurance? The meals inside your freezer.
“Insurance policies will pay as much as $2,000 without deductible for loss or damage to food while contained in a freezer found on your premises, caused by mechanical introduction to the freezer or accidental interruption of electrical energy on or off the premises,” says Dyer. Insurance will also cover reasonable expenses incurred by you to save and preserve the meals from spoilage while your brand-new freezer is being purchased. If you visit a hardware store to buy a free-standing freezer, your home insurance plan should cover that. (The trip itself will not be covered with insurance, so no claiming mileage.)
Home insurance is for all those excitement. If you follow that rule then there's an excellent chance you'll be able to always get coverage
Another quirky home insurance claim example that Dyer has heard about goes such as this: someone was redoing their floors so that they moved all their furniture outside. But then there is an unexpected thunderstorm, which ruined the furnishings. The policyholder made a property insurance claim using their provider and it was accepted.
There are lots of unexpected things your home insurance will cover. Plane parts fall in the sky and damage your home? You can make claims for that. Tree falls over and lands on your roof? You may make claims for that, too. Friend trips and falls into your table? They can claim if they are injured and you may claim when the table is damaged.
That's the power of comprehensive home insurance. But when will it can even make sense to create a claim? And will doing so increase your premium or hinder your ability to obtain insurance in the future?
The problem with claiming everything in your home insurance policy
While it's tempting to make a claim against your property insurance insurance policy for anything and everything, it's not necessarily recommended.
Dyer says that policy owners shouldn't treat their house insurance policy like a maintenance contract. “Home insurance coverage is for all those excitement,” says Dyer. “And if you follow that rule then there's an excellent chance you'll be able to always get insurance coverage. But when you're placing a claim set for every little thing, you're gonna have a hard time finding someone to insure you.”
Making frequent claims can affect what you can do to get home insurance in the future. An insurer might take phone quantity of claims you have made in recent history and decide that it doesn't make good business sense to sell you coverage.
Repeated claims could possibly get costly for you, too, if you're always having to pay your deductible every time you claim. Dyer says if you can afford to replace the damaged items, it may be easier to do this than make a claim.
Will a home claim increase my premiums?
“It's nothing like car insurance,” says Dyer, where fault is a huge determinant in whether you'll face a rise in premium after making a claim.
Home insurance firms don't really track and record fault in the same way that auto insurance companies do. For that reason, you can expect to pay the deductible whenever you create a home insurance claim. Whether investing in that claim increases your premiums, however, is another question.
The number of property insurance claims you are making can obviously affect your premium, but that's just one component that affects just how much you'll pay.
The the easy way determine whether it makes sense to place with the claim in your property insurance would be to work with a broker. They can tell you whether it's a wise decision, how it will affect your premiums, and when it'll hurt what you can do to get coverage in the future.