Valuing Insurance Claim with large collection of Books

tacpot12

Hi 

I'm about to renew our insurance, and had a question about how a future claim would be valued due to the number of books we have in the house. 

I've had a quick count up and estimate we have about 1,500 books. A very few, perhaps 50, have some real value and might cost £100 each to replace, the rest I would expect to be able to replace for less than £20 per book. So the total value in books might be as much as £34K. 

Last year, we declared the value of our contents as being £100K. My partner thinks we need to up this, but I've realised that I'm not really sure how an insurer will value the books if we ever needed to make a claim  They are not a really collection although I have referred to them as such in the title, they are 1500 individual/random books.

I have a partial catalogue of the books that I own (about 200), as otherwise I wouldn't be able to find them in among my partner's books, but she doesn't have a catalogue, and cataloging them is going to a be mammoth task. She wants to over-estimate their value so she doesn't have to catalogue them, e.g. saying they are worth £50K. But I think an insurer will want some evidence that they existed and what they were. As a stop gap I can video the shelves and shelves of books, and we can catalogue to most valuable.  

Fire is the principle risk we are looking to insure these books against. (The books themselves represent a significant fire load!) 

Does anyone have any experience or knowledge of how an insurance company would value books in this sort of situation?

Thanks

pramsay13

I don't have any experience but you are talking about a new for old policy, but most policies pay out the value. 
So even if a book costs £100 new and that is what it would cost you to replace, if it is only worth £20 that is what you will get for that book.

tacpot12

Thanks. I understand that we will only get back the amount of money that the insurers assess it will cost to replace the books (which could be as much as the price that they were new in a few cases), but how will they assess the cost of replacing 1,500 books if we can't even name all of them?

Aretnap

You shouldn't need to catalogue things like books individually; I would think if you have 1000 unremarkable paperbacks you can assume an average value - what is the price of a typical paperback these days? A picture of the bookshelves should suffice as evidence that you owned roughly that number of paperbacks.

If you have some rare/valuable books it's probably worth cataloguing and photographing them individually, if you don't want them just to be subsumed into the average value.

Most household policies offer new for old cover, ie they will pay out the cost of new replacements for things, not the second hand value. However certain types of items (eg clothing and bed linen) are often excluded from new for old cover. Not sure whether books fall into that category but it is worth checking the details of your policy. Obviously the value will depend on whether you are insuring for the new or the second hand value. 

Sandtree

tacpot12 said:

Thanks. I understand that we will only get back the amount of money that the insurers assess it will cost to replace the books (which could be as much as the price that they were new in a few cases), but how will they assess the cost of replacing 1,500 books if we can't even name all of them?

Insurers work on the basis of probability. 

For large losses, fire and flood being often causes, they look at both what remains and any photographic evidence. So you have a "library" with lots of photos of the two of you in front of shelves of books and they come after a fire and see lots of burnt remains of shelves etc then 2 and 2 adds up.

Where insurers get concerned is where someone is a new customer, they declare themselves as a minimum wage job, they inspect the remains of a fire and everything they find it Primark or cheaper but the policyholder claims everything that burnt was Channel or Hermes etc

tacpot12

Thank you everyone. We can certainly catalogue the books that are worth more than the typical amount, and I will video and take photos of the shelves of books we have.