Home insurance is something that many people do not think about until it is too late. In fact, 23 % of homeowners in Australia do not have home insurance. And of the ones that do, 83% are underinsured. Those are alarming statistics when you factor in the costs of repairing and replacing a home. Not to mention how much you could be liable for if someone should get hurt on your property. Lawsuits for trip and fall accidents are continuing to rise, which means that you are more and more likely to be hit with a lawsuit by someone.
This means you need to double check your current policy to ensure that you are covered for the amounts you should be. After you make those changes, you will be ready to follow a few steps to get your insurance premiums reduced without cutting any corners.
- Increase Your Excess Amounts – The easiest way to reduce your home insurance is to increase the amount of your excess/deductible. The higher you put this number, the lower your premium will go. Do not do this without checking on a few things, though, because you could end up owing more than you can afford to pay before your insurance carrier covers anything on a claim. You want to make sure that you have a current budget in front of you. This will let you know how much money you have left over every month. You do not want to have more excess than what you have left over because you do not want to dig into your savings. Knowing this amount will help you decide how high you can go with your deductible, so do not skip this step.
- Compare Insurance Carriers – You never want to go with your first offer. In fact, after you have your budget in order, you will need to go online to a site to find out how much home and contents insurance is. The easiest way to do this is to use a comparison site online that will do all the work for you. The hard work, anyway, which will leave you having to sort through the offers that their partners send you. You are trying to lower your costs, so you need to make sure that you compare the prices that they are promising you. Still, you also need to ensure that the coverage amounts and levels are what you want them to be.
- Check Your Numbers – When you first applied for the home insurance policy, you probably noticed that you needed to have an estimate of the value of your contents. You need to have an accurate idea of the value of your valuables, so go through the house and list everything you need to have covered. Write down the item, its serial number, the values when you bought them, and the current market values. This will help you get an exact idea of what numbers you are looking at so you can get a policy that covers what you need without going overboard. When you go overboard with insurance, it costs you. Plus, if you ever have to file a claim, the list will make it easy for the insurance carrier, which will speed up the process by a substantial amount.
These are the three top things you can do to decrease the costs of your premiums. An important thing to remember is to read before you sign. Read every part of the contract, remove the things you do not need, and adjust the numbers according to what you want. When the insurance carrier offers you an agreement, it will be a generic one they give to others. If you want it to be personalized for your specific needs, you must change things before you agree to anything. If it is not cheaper than your current plan, you may not want to switch over, depending on the details of both plans.
