Proud of Myself - Home Insurance

lisyloo

How much alcohol and toiletries do people have to make a difference of £1000 to their contents cover?

I've got about 50 bottles of wine/champagne - some worth £25.
That might not be normal, but the point is I had forgotten to include it even though I've purposely gone round every room and done an itinerary which is more than most people do (didn't look quite so carefully in the garage). Luckily I've included quite a bit of contingency for precisely this reason.
So I think the point was that there are a lot of things that people forget to include.
I would add a few more examples.
Mirrors, light fittings etc.
Depends on what sort of house you have but if you have wall lights and fireplace lights, then it all adds up.
Very easy to forget about all the equipment in your kitchen in the cupoboards - pots, pans, baking trays, food processor, juicer, coffee machine, coffee grinder etc.
Most people will have a collection of books, LPs, videos, cds, dvds.

I think the main point is that there things have to be valued at the new price, it's easy to forget and whilst you might not want to replace your old video/LP collection the insurer can decide you under-insured causing issues for your claim and possibly a black mark forever (declaring cancelled policy).

If the £15K is genuine then that's fine, but if a number of "unimportant" items have been forgotten about - like old books, videos, cds etc. then it's not fine.

dunstonh

£15k is very low. you can imagine that if there was a claim, that an insurer will be out on this one looking at the contents lost to see if the sum insured is too low. Its like waving a red flag saying come and get me.

mikey72

lisyloo wrote: »

I've got about 50 bottles of wine/champagne - some worth £25.
That might not be normal........

My point exacly, you have to go some to get a wine collection to take you from 15k to 16K.

lisyloo

My point exacly, you have to go some to get a wine collection to take you from 15k to 16K.

I agree with you on alcohol as a single item but that was one example of things that might have been missed. It's very easy to miss things or wrongly believe they aren't included or value them incorrectly on a new basis. I bet a lot of people miss curtains and light fittings etc. when they are looking round a room.
It's just a warning - that's all.

michael1983l

Is it in the T@Cs that you have to insure everything in your house? How can they decide to pay you less if you have decided you are only totalling up the big items and that you don't want the smaller insignificant items insured. All I am arsed about is the furniture, TV and PC.

InsideInsurance

If it were a case of just insuring elements of your contents you would be required to individually list all the items you want covered, otherwise when you have a claim you would say that you were just so lucky that the full £14,980 of items that were taken from the bedroom were the ones you were insuring and the TV in the lounge or the cooker in the kitchen you'd never felt the need to cover.

michael1983l

Well I am still within my cool down period and I suppose I will cancel it. So they will miss out on a premium instead.

kingstreet

I was a bit concerned at the rebuild cost you've used for the buildings insurance. £95k? Is that from a surveyor's report? That's not what you think the property value is?

Just to check, I ran the BCIS calculator for the following example;-

Terrace
2 beds
1900 build
Staffordshire area
100m2
2 storeys no cellar

and the recommended rebuild cost was £144k.

It gave a min of £127k and a max of £175k dependent on quality of fittings. Your property may well be different, but be careful to ensure you have adequate cover.

lisyloo

As for the rebuild I have a mate who's a builder and he estimated that price.

Is that the price for just rebuilding the house?

If your house blew up the it might be that half a house needs to be cleared before they can start rebuilding. You also might want temporary accomodation for several months.

Make sure you ahve these figures correct.

InsideInsurance

Be aware of the cancellation fee you may have to pay if you do decide to cancel. It may be worth seeing if it is cheaper to amend the sums insured with that provider than to cancel and move elsewhere