personal possessions insurance

thelawnet

Any suggestions?

I'd like to cover:

mobile phone damage/loss/theft in and away from the home (for me + wife)
Oakley prescription sunglasses loss/damage (for me)
bike/bike accessories (lights, GPS) theft in/away from home

I don't have a home contents cover policy currently, I guess it will be cheaper to do it this way?

lisyloo

I think your going to need a home contents cover policy and make sure of the conditions and personal possessional cover. You need to check what's excluded.

However you would need to look at the conditions.
For example if your lights/GPS just clip on/off, you can't just leave them on your bike and expect to be covered.
You would be expected to lock your bike to something permanent and remove any items that just clip on/off.
In a car you'd be expected to put things in a locked glove compartment or boot.

Youre going to need to check the policy terms and conditions or try an insurance broker to advise you.

Note that it's generally not worth making small claims on insurance.
This is because you lose your no claims discount and get chrged higher premiums in future and have an excess. I don't know how "high end" you phone is but I question whether it's worth insuring phones, bike lights and GPS these days.

thelawnet

Good points.

I had a look at some home insurance policies and there are so many exclusions there, and also one thing in particular was a £100 excess with every policy.

Am looking at about £120+ for a year's insurance in my area.

But then it's hard to figure out if it would cover you for a broken phone, sunglasses left in a cafe or whatever.

lisyloo

and there are so many exclusions there

Unfortunately these have to cover insurers against both fraud and carelessness.

Personally I don't think it's reasonable to leave items in plain sight in a car and expect them to be covered. Similarly it's not reasonable to leave items unattended on a beach or on your bike and free for anyone to take. That's not the idea of insurance.

Why don't you self-insure?
i.e. put the £120 in a bank account annually and use that to payout if anything happens. There are pros and cons to this method, but one big pro is that the only person that gets to decide the terms and conditions is you.

I self-insure for any situation I can reasonable afford and then only buy insurance where I either can't afford it or really want the peace of mind.

thelawnet

I don't have a problem with self-insurance financially.

What I was thinking really was that I might get good value out of it because my wife has had a phone stolen and broken two phones in the last two months, so it might be better to get insurance.

A few years ago I didn't have anything I might carry about with me and lose, now I do, so I'm just purely thinking of the perspective that it might be cheaper to have insurance.

InsideInsurance

You'll find yourself uninsurable very quickly if you are going to make 3 claims in as many months for damaged/ lost mobiles.

Insurance is there for the unpredictable, you exchange that unpredictability for a known premium. It is however fairly predictable that over time we are going to have the occasional thing lost/ dropped etc and for low(ish) value items like sunglasses or mobiles it is rarely worth claiming due to the future impact on premiums.

Where it does become much more worth while is evidently getting a handbag snatched where you lose glasses, mobile, the bag itself, cash, purse, keys etc rather than just a single item. In the home, for most people, then the losses are even bigger if there is a fire or flood etc