Renewal - Specified item vs Gadget cover (vs photography!)

James_Blonde

At renewal, my home and contents cover has gone up from £1000 to £1600.  that alone begs a ton of questions, but I've been running through comparison sites, and also with my current providers website quote system to try to figure out how best to insure.

I've got a lot of electronics - camera equipment mainly.  Comparison sites tend to lump all of my "gadgets" > £1500 - cameras, lenses, laptop, PC, etc under specified items, and that's how I've always covered them (and successfully claimed in the past).  However my insurance provider has a specific "Gadgets" category under contents, so I thought I'd running my gadgets through that - it put the price up to £2200 before I'd even entered everything! 

Running it through their quote system as "specified items" gave me a price of £1350

Why?!!  

Having also looked at the price of gadget insurance separately, I cannot get my head around the price - you'd be as well off just buying or repairing at your own cost, or making sure you claim once every year to make it worthwhile.  Is it the volume of claims that puts the price up so high?

I also thought I'd run a quote for photography insurance, which came out around £280 - probably a little bit more than specified contents, but specifically covered cameras, lenses, drone, laptops, tablets, PC, server, etc and I think might have given me public liability as well.  But how can they cover "gadgets" for a fraction of the price of gadget insurance?

Whole thing has left me a bit confused!

(and then we move onto musical instrument insurance (which seems worth it) and bike insurance (only seems worth it with a first year discount, but then it is specialist bike insurance rather than home contents)

DullGreyGuy

The problem with home insurance is that you have to declare the value of everything in your home irrespective of if you have other insurances. Only when you get to the upper tier of policies, namely aimed at the high net worth, do they get more comfortable with you having separate policies for your art collection etc. 

What you aren't obliged to do with Home is cover things outside the home and thats where more specialist policies potentially come in. 

Different insurers have different specified item levels, when you go to an Aggregator they have to deal with the lowest common denominator so normally ask for anything over £1,000-£1,500 as thats the typical limit for unspecified in budget policies. This is where differential pricing starts to come in, go to M&S and get a quote for their Home Premier and the single article limit is £15,000 other than for bicycles to be insured outside of the home and so on their website we dont have to declare any single items so they ultimately price on an assumption. Go to confused.com and we have to declare all my camera lenses, wife's handbags, laptops, phones etc and seeing as M&S get more data they can price differently as they can see we have an unusually high amount of high value items. 

Work out what your high cost items are, look for a Home Insurer with an appropriately high single article limit. If you have one or two outlier items then you could also look at a policy with a lower limit where most are covered by default and you just have to declare those couple of items. 

We pay c£600 (contents only) for unlimited cover, £50k valuables (jewellery, art etc not electronics etc) and £25k outside the home. Last time I got a quote from someone with a low single article limit the cost was £2,000 just for the outside the home cover. 

James_Blonde

Wow, ok!  Didn't really appreciate that I still needed to specify the items on home contents even if insured elsewhere - that puts a different spin on it and arguably makes looking elsewhere pointless. 

I think for me the interesting point was where I looked at the providers site alongside the aggregators.  The provider (HomeProtect) obviously want and have the capacity for more info.  When you drill into what they're looking for, they want specified items £1500 or more, and the value of ANY item you want covered outside the home.  So that's potentially a lot of specified extras when it comes to my particularly photography and IT kit / editing kit - I mean that's all £30K in itself (not all of which is or needs to be specified.

They also have an option to cover "mobile phones or other electronic gadgets" and I have to admit, given they've got it, I wonder if they expect my gear to be covered in that section (massively massively elevated premium) or under the specified items? 

Comparison sites weren't really giving me a lot of options this year.  HomeProtect consistently came out cheapest across the board, M&S didn't show in the list so maybe I need to go direct to a few of the bigger providers, or go to a broker.  I just renewed by default last year, which might have been a mistake, but this year given the premium, I'm going all in - contents spreadsheet (which is eyewatering when you realise how much replacing stuff would cost), testing a lot of the quote options on buildings, etc. 

DullGreyGuy

James_Blonde said:
Comparison sites weren't really giving me a lot of options this year.  HomeProtect consistently came out cheapest across the board, M&S didn't show in the list so maybe I need to go direct to a few of the bigger providers, or go to a broker.  I just renewed by default last year, which might have been a mistake, but this year given the premium, I'm going all in - contents spreadsheet (which is eyewatering when you realise how much replacing stuff would cost), testing a lot of the quote options on buildings, etc. 

M&S is Aviva behind the scenes but I fit better into their white label product than the direct Aviva offerings. 

I've auto renewed for several years because their product suits us well with it being unlimited contents for any single item up to £15k and only jewellery, watches, art capped at £50k plus can cover "tenants improvements" for the kitchen we put in (though that has to be done over the phone). 

Most others won't touch us without a premium 5x them, there aren't many mid net worth policies out there and most have a £1k minimum premium and we dont have enough to fit into high net worth policies. 

M&S used to be Axa and at that time Axa sold a very similar direct product too but when M&S switched to Aviva Axa also withdrew its own product. We made a claim last year which pushed the premiums up 25% this year but given the Mrs only ever uses her bike for a ride around and doesn't lock it up outside the home removing the bike outside the home cover offset the increase. 

James_Blonde

Sounds like we're in a not too dissimilar position WRT contents, though buildings is different.  We're Cat C listed (Scotland) so not even a high listing but Doh, turns out, M&S won't cover a listed property as they do blanket coverage (though rebuild costs would be less than half their limit).  Might try Aviva directly though.  Otherwise that policy would have been fine!