What Is Coverage E On Renters Insurance? Coverage E Covers Personal Liability For Bodily Injury or Property Damage, And Includes A Few Other Benefits As Well!
Effective Coverage operates under a set of core values that serve to help us to both offer the best insurance products and services that renters need, but also to focus a significant amount of corporate effort on education.
We believe that you deserve to work with a company that wants to help you understand your policy. We also understand that many people don’t want to know everything about their Charleston, SC Renters Insurance.
That’s fine, but there are a few basics that you should understand because it will help you to know what your policy covers and why it’s important. Reading your policy is always a good idea, of course. But it’s difficult to read your policy if you don’t know what to expect from each section!
We’ve previously covered Coverage A, Coverage B, Coverage C, and Coverage D in separate articles. Can you believe we’re almost done going over the basics of the standard renters insurance policy? We’ll touch on Coverage E below, after our Video Guide To Renters Insurance, so stick with us!
What Is Coverage E On Renters Insurance?
Coverage E is also known as renters insurance personal liability coverage. It’s designed to pay for bodily injury or property damage that you cause to someone who is not an insured. In other words, the sorts of things that people could sue you for and win. (More on that later!)
Coverage E is broad, and designed to protect you against anything meeting that description that’s not an “intended or expected” result of your actions. In other words, you wouldn’t have coverage for punching someone in the face. Perhaps you hit too hard and the injury is more severe than you expected or intended, but injury was still the desired result of your action.
Just like anything else in insurance, there’s an exception to the “intended or expected” caveat…
As you probably know, your children are insureds under your policy. “Named insured” generally includes you, resident relatives, and your resident spouse. Kids below the age of 13 are generally held not to understand the potential severity of their actions, or the chain of consequences arising from them. So if your ten year old gets in a fight at school, that loss might be covered because even though the result was expected or intended, they don’t have the capacity to see the potential severity of the injury.
What Sorts Of Losses Would Coverage E Protect Me Against?
You don’t expect to cause bodily injury or property damage, right? What would happen if you were carelessly walking and texting at the same time, and didn’t see the person on crutches in your way? As you hurry towards your destination, you bump the person on crutches just enough that they fall, and they suffer additional injury.
Is that due to your negligence? You bet, you should have been looking where you were going. Is there bodily injury? Sounds like, at a glance. Coverage E could respond to this loss and take care of those additional injuries suffered by the poor person on crutches.
As you wander through an antique store, you pick up a very old piece of china to take a closer look. Unfortunately, you forgot that you had KFC for lunch, and your hands are still greasy. The priceless relic slips from your hand and shatters on the floor. Coverage E can respond to that type of loss, as well. There’s negligence, and you didn’t expect or intend that result.
There are a wide variety of losses to which personal liability, or Coverage E, can respond. Many are the sort of things that happen every day, because people just aren’t as careful as they should be every single moment of their life. People get distracted, and bad things happen as a result. That’s negligence, and that’s why renters insurance exists!
Is There Anything Else That Coverage E Does?
Yes! Coverage E has another element, and it’s an incredibly important one that most people don’t give much thought to! If there is a loss that would be covered under Coverage E, the insurance company has a duty to defend you against the lawsuit or claim arising from the loss!
That means they’re paying for the lawyer, and they’re probably choosing a lawyer with a great deal of experience in matters just like yours. Nonetheless, they’re still your lawyer even though the insurance company is paying for it. While the aforementioned property damage in an antique shop might not require this, the bodily injury examples are quite likely to lead to a lawsuit.
Can you afford a lawyer to defend against that? If you can, do you want to pay for that lawyer? Probably not! Insurance is designed to return you to the financial condition you were in before the loss, and defense coverage under Coverage E helps with that. Those expenses are significant and not likely to be something you’ve budgeted for in advance.
Why Does My Landlord Require Coverage E On My Renters Insurance?
Your landlord requires you to have Charleston, SC Renters Insurance with Coverage E because they want to know that if you damage the building through your negligence that they can recover from your policy. This could be something as simple as turning away from the stove for a few moments and having a small kitchen fire. That “small” kitchen fire could still be $30,000 or more in damages.
Your landlord also wants to know that there is an insurance policy that his insurance can go after in the case of a loss like that. In other words, the landlord doesn’t want his insurance to subrogate directly against a tenant, because that’s bad for the tenant and bad business. By ensuring that you have renters insurance with Coverage E, the landlord knows that the matter will essentially be between his insurance company and yours, rather than between him and you. That’s a better outcome for everyone.
You can afford renters insurance with Coverage E – it’s a standard part of the policy!
The national average price of renters insurance is just $187.00, according to the III. That works out to as little as fifteen dollars per month. The vast majority of families can budget renters insurance easily at those prices.
Additionally, it's important to note that renters are at a significantly higher risk of experiencing loss than homeowners. Renters occupy roughly one third of total housing stock in the country, and yet they are fully fifty percent more likely to experience theft than homeowners, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
It only costs a few dollars a month to protect your family, and this cheap renters insurance is a great way to mitigate the additional risks that come with being a renter.
To find out more, or to get covered in minutes, just call (800)892-4308 or click to get covered - whether you need Charleston, SC renters insurance quotes online or coverage anywhere else!
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