Things You Didn't Know About Home Insurance

At the most basic level a home insurance policy should provide cover for the external building and your home's contents. The buildings insurance is for the cost of repairing the actual structure of your home should it be damaged or destroyed completely, while contents insurance covers the cost of replacing your belongings within your home. However, there's so much more your home insurance policy can offer.

Here are Staysure's top 10 tips for home insurance:

Personal Belongings

In a recent Staysure survey 14% of customers admitted to not knowing that their personal belongings could be covered under their home insurance when they were away from the home. Personal Belongings can even be covered under your home insurance when you are travelling and will be replaced on a new for old basis.

Garden and Outbuildings

In addition to the actual structure of your home you can also have cover for your garden, including any ornaments or features. Outbuildings can also be covered in the event of damage or total destruction.

Automatic Uplift of freezer contents

We all know that at Christmas time the freezer is stocked full of more goods than we usually need in a year. That is why many home insurance policies can offer automatic uplift of freezer contents during holidays and festivals so you can be sure your turkey is covered!

Water leaks

Many policies will now provide cover and help if you spot a water leak in the house. Based on the fact that acting now will help prevent problems in the future, many insurers will help fix these types of problems and make sure that they don't become a much bigger problem further down the line, which would be a headache for everyone!

Emergency services

If for any reason the emergency services have to ever break into your home in a critical situation, many policies will now provide cover for putting right any damage caused. Always good to know but hopefully never needed!

Mortgages

Building Societies will always encourage you to take home insurance tied in with the mortgage. This may suit them but does not automatically mean you are being offered the best deal available in the marketplace. You are always completely free to buy insurance for your home from any of the providers in the marketplace so long as you supply details to your mortgage provider – and if you have just paid off your mortgage or are planning to, there's no excuse for not shopping around to save some money!

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Nearly all home insurers will automatically increase your sum insured for re-build costs or replacement contents every year so you only need to worry if you feel that this figure has increased or decreased for other reasons e.g. you've sold some valuable contents or bought something extra.

Legal cover

This is always worth taking out when you insure your home as it gives you protection across a whole number of areas. For example, Staysure's legal service cover gives you access to a phone line for free help and advice on a range of issues from identity theft to consumer disputes.

Emergency breakdown cover

Many insurers, including Staysure, now offer home emergency cover should you suffer any problems which would make your home unsafe or insecure. There are extra cover levels and even the opportunity for an annual boiler service. This is a great way of making sure everything is working OK before we go into what might turn out to be another hard winter.

Buildings insurance

Always make sure you know the accurate re-build cost of your home and the replacement cost for your contents. Even if you have what is called a blanket cover policy which, for example, covers your buildings up to a maximum re-build cost of £500K or £1M, this will still be calculated using a number of factors including the size of your house and its location. It may well pay you to shop around with an accurate re-build cost in mind.

The above cover benefits are all available in Staysure's policies and our home insurance experts can tailor the policy to suit your needs - you can even chose from a wide range of polices from some of our leading partners including; Allianz, Legal and General, Ageas, Aviva, Paragon, and Towergate. Call our home insurance experts for a tailor-made quote on 0844 692 8400 or alternatively click "Get a Quote".