Protect Your House With Home Insurance
For most people, a house is the most expensive asset they own, and perhaps the most important. Any damage to your house feels like a personal loss. Consider what might happen in case of Total loss; losing your home can emotionally destroy people. This is why it is crucial to create safeguards to protect your home from all possible threats, including natural disasters.
Natural disasters come unannounced and cause mass destruction. There is no way to stop these disasters from happening, which means there is no way to protect your home against it. However, you can protect your wallet from the strain of having to rebuild everything from scratch.
You have the option to invest in a Home Insurance policy and protect it against the threat caused by natural calamities. To get a better understanding, take a look at all the benefits you can reap out of it in case the worse does happen -
Why buy Home Insurance?
Coverage
A Home Insurance policy in India features two types of coverage – structure, and content. The first covers the fabric of your home, like the built-in items and permanent fixtures, while the latter is responsible for covering the loss of your belongings within the house, including appliances and jewelry.
There are a number of General Insurance companies in India offering comprehensive home insurance plans that include both of the mentioned coverage types.
Additional coverage
Besides covering your property and the assets from unpredictable natural calamities, home insurances can also provide additional coverage to help you maximize the benefits of the home insurance. This add-on coverage could provide for the cost of living in a rented accommodation, which could extend as long as 12 months after the disaster until your house can be properly repaired or rebuilt. This sort of coverage further helps reduce the stress related to loss of assets due to unforeseen circumstances.
Third-Party liability covers
Third-party liability coverage is another major benefit that comes along with Home Insurances. This cover is meant to protect the policyholder against any lawsuits for damage caused to others by the insured. So, if your neighbor makes a claim for the loss of his possessions that might have been in your possession when the damage was caused, your insurance policy will take care of it.
Tips to consider when buying home insurance
Ensure sufficient insurance
Not having sufficient coverage can be a major financial drawback as it could leave you underinsured at the time of claim. To make sure that this does not happen, make it a point to mention the actual market value of your property and not a lower price. People also get penalized for misinforming or lying to the insurance companies and hence receive a lower claim payout.
Invest in the right kind of policy
To optimize benefits from your Home Insurance, it is important that you buy the right plan for yourself. For instance, if you are a tenant, opting for a content-only Home Insurance policy might be enough, but the same would not be ideal if you are the homeowner.
Some buyers also get themselves “add-ons” along with their insurance plans, for increased coverage. A “new-for-old” add-on is one such beneficial add-on coverage which is mostly available with comprehensive Home Insurance plans. This add-on lets you get all your damaged goods replaced by your insurer instead of reimbursing the claimed amount. However, this scheme is only applicable to items which are not older than five years.
Policy tenure
When buying Home Insurance from a General Insurance company in India, you will come across plans with different tenures. These may take the form of annual policies or multi-year insurance policies. You can either opt for a yearly policy as it will give you the option to reconsider your sum insured every year, or you can choose the long-term, multi-year policy that will get you discounted premium rates.
Before you buy, it is imperative that you do thorough research on the company’s profile, its reputation, and the Claim-To-Settlement ratio; this way you can make an informed decision when buying your Home Insurance policy.
**To understand exactly about the policy coverage, exclusions etc read the Policy Wordings carefully.**