Best Homeowner Insurance Quote Guide |
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Getting down to the nitty gritty, coverage for the actual structure that is your house is the first thing that most people think about when homeowner insurance is mentioned. To be more specific, if something were to damage your house, this is the feature of the your insurance policy that dictates the coverage you have, and what type of reimbursement you’ll receive. Think damage from fire, smoke, wind, water, storm, lighting, and so on.
Keep in mind the type of house that you live in. The first major discrepancy that comes to mind is the difference between a single family home and a condominium. In today’s world the two dwellings have become so similar that we rarely attribute any differences to them. But that’s not true in the insurance world. Condominium coverage usually covers interior structure such as drywall and fixtures (lighting, plumbing, HVAC, & etc), but not exterior features like siding, roofing, and so on. This is something to keep in mind from both sides, the one being that you need to make sure your association has proper coverage for the outside of your condo, and the other side in that you shouldn’t be paying for it as well!
If you rent a house, the owner should hold the homeowner insurance policy, and you should carry a renters policy that covers all your belongings on the inside of the dwelling, plus some basic liability coverage.
When looking over a policy, ask the agent to specifically explain the unfortunate events that are not covered by the policy. That can include such things as floods and earthquakes, which could be a very important point if you’re living on a fault line or in a flood plain. In the south where it’s humid and warm most of the year, it is not uncommon for insurance companies to exclude mold, fungus, and dry rot from their coverage. These are all things you want to know before you call them to make a claim, trust me.
Best Homeowner Insurance Quote Guide |
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I’m not going to tell you where to get the best insurance quote from. There’s plenty of ways you can already find that by just looking around. There’s literally thousands of companies out there that want to sell you insurance, so finding them won’t be the problem. Where you’re going to run into difficulty is figuring out which one is giving you the best quote. And it’s not nearly as easy as some people think.
For starters, no comparison is simple unless you’re comparing apples to apples. In the insurance world, that’s rarely the case. There are so many variables in insurance policies that can change that it would take a team of a million monkeys a million years to figure it out. And by that time your policy would be useless.
Really, though, you need to make sure what you’re comparing between companies is as similar as possible, and make absolutely certain that they are identical in the areas where it counts. I would consider those areas to be the coverage levels and deductible in the areas of house structure coverage, personal asset coverage, liability, and off-premise living.
Let me start by addressing both camps - those who think that’s an over simplification and those who think it’s grossly under simplified. To those who think it’s too simple of a structure, please suspend disbelief and put yourself in the shoes of an average homeowner looking for the best homeowner insurance quote they can find. The industry is complicated and very “legal”. I think we can all agree that for someone who is on the outside looking in, this is a adequate framework within which to begin.
To those who think it’s too complicated, well, I don’t have a good answer. You can certainly sift out one or two of the categories, but I think the average homeowner will be doing themselves a huge disservice by overlooking any of these areas. Especially when a pipe breaks on the second floor while they’re away and they have to live in an apartment while someone rips their house apart to replace everything.
That being said, those are the four areas that I’m going to frame the next several articles around. My belief is that with a good understanding of those areas, the average homeowner can understand and evaluate the homeowner insurance quotes that they get, making an informed decision in the end.