Do you really know how much the contents of your house are worth? Over the years, you've purchased clothes, shoes, gadgets, sports goods, books, not to mention knives, forks, cups, plates, tables, chairs and beds. When you sit down to think about it, you can't help wondering whether you might not be a tad light on insurance.
Of course, when you first took out your insurance, you may have had a fairly firm idea of how much your contents were worth. However, it's worth remembering that as the years pass, calculations made in the dim, distant days of the early 1990s, don't necessarily tell us much about our current need for coverage.
Even if we've kept a fairly tight hold on the purse strings in recent years, the chances are that it would cost far more to replace our contents now than it would have done at the time we took out the insurance. Our own experience, at TOWER, certainly supports the view that most people's contents are under-insured even where they have adequate insurance cover on the house itself.
It's worth taking a look at some of the situations in which the level of our contents coverage would be important. The most obvious case is if a fire or some other disaster completely destroyed our house. There are literally thousands of practical things that we would need replaced. In addition, there are things such as family heirlooms or pictures of the children as they were growing up. It's not always easy to put a monetary value on items of this type but we would certainly want to be compensated as much as possible for their loss.
Even if your house is not a complete write-off, you may still be faced with substantial loss and damage with respect to contents. For example, a fire might be contained in just one part of the house but the smoke is likely to permeate into every room, causing considerable harm in the process. Similarly, a flood may do only restricted damage to the structure of the house but its effect on your furniture, carpets and other belongings could be horrifying.
And then there is the moment we all fear, when we come home and find that uninvited guests have broken in during our absence and made off with some of our prize possessions. However many precautions we have taken against burglaries, there is no guarantee that they won't happen. It really does make sense to be properly insured in addition to making your house as burglar proof as possible!
Our guess is that most people are under-insured because they haven't taken the time to work out exactly how much they own. However, there are also many people who regard the cost of adequate home insurance as prohibitive. Perhaps they should take another look at how premium levels work. The fact is that you can double the extent of your coverage by paying far less than twice as much in terms of premiums.
Another consideration is that the benefits of adequate contents insurance are actually on the increase. At TOWER, we automatically offer the full replacement value of lost or damaged items in new policies taken out.
Get a Contents Insurance quote
For your contents insurance quote or for more information about TOWER's insurance policies, call us on 0800 379 372 Monday - Sunday 8.00am - 8.00pm or complete TOWER's online quote request form and we will contact you.
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