Not everyone who rents lives in an apartment. It’s very much possible to get renters insurance for a home, and it’s perhaps even more important than if you live in an apartment. A larger amount of money is potentially at stake with regards to a liability claim, and you’re likely to have more personal property, as well.
So what do you need to know about Brownsville, TX Renters Insurance, or about renters insurance for a home anywhere in the country?
With Renters Insurance For A Home, The Liability Risk Is Higher
If you need renters insurance for a home, your liability risk is much greater. Apartments generally have built-in firewalls and other safety features that can limit most fire damage to a single unit, for instance. When you rent a home, you’re insuring yourself against the risk of negligently destroying the entire asset rather than just one unit of a building.
The good news is this: Your worst case scenario is likely to be the replacement cost of the structure. That is rarely anywhere near its market value. When you buy renters insurance for a home, you’re not worried about the land on which it sits. You’re also not worried about what it might sell for. In areas where property values are rapidly increasing, this is important to remember.
The largest part of your liability risk when renting a home is needing to rebuild the home from the ground up. For most homes of common construction, this is a number far lower than the market value. It amounts to, more or less, the local construction cost per square foot times the square feet of the home.
While your landlord may only require $100,000 of renters insurance for a home, is that enough? In most cases, while it makes you compliant with the lease requirement, it’s not a prudent amount. Consider what the cost to rebuild the home might be. Now consider what it would cost to bump up your liability to $300,000 or $500,000 as appropriate – often as little as twenty or thirty dollars a year additional.
Once you have a renters insurance policy, and once you have liability coverage, increasing the limits of that liability coverage generally does not incur significant additional costs. It’s worth looking into for many reasons. The insurance company will defend you against claims that would be paid by the policy until the limits of liability are exhausted. There’s not really a way to buy additional defense coverage beyond that, though increasing your liability limits does have a similar result, to some degree.
You Have More Space, Therefore You Have More Stuff
When you buy renters insurance for a home, you’re filling far more space in that home than you would in an apartment. That means you’ll have more stuff. Some of that personal property will be things you’ve already acquired over the years, but some of it will be property that you’re purchasing now that you have the space for it. Living room furniture is a great example.
Renters Insurance For A Home
In addition to the moving expenses and the usual deposit, you’ll find that you spend a significant amount of money in furnishing your new home. That’s fine, and you can normally replenish those savings over the course of the next few years. But what if there’s a fire or theft loss when you’ve only been in the home for a month?
Renters insurance for a home should contemplate the value of the personal property you already have as well as what you’re acquiring in order to move in. An early loss could make it very difficult for you to put money back into the savings account that you’ve raided in order to buy new things to move in.
And of course, you want replacement cost coverage. You’ve just purchased a ton of things that are all new, all of which depreciate rapidly as soon as you purchase them. What’s the actual cash value of a “new” living room couch that’s actually six months old and has been sitting in your living room? Certainly nowhere near what it would cost you to buy a new one.
Replacement cost coverage on renters insurance for a home is especially important if you are leasing or renting furnishings. The leasing or rental company will expect to be paid for their property if it suffers a loss, even if the fire wasn’t your fault. You don’t want to do that out of your own pocket, of course. That’s where your Brownsville, TX Renters Insurance comes into play.
Renters Insurance For A Home Is Generally No More Costly Than Protecting An Apartment
Renters insurance for a home is priced based on you, your location, your coverage, and safety features of the building. You, the general location, and the safety features of the building are probably all on par with when you were renting an apartment. The coverage is often the only significant difference.
Liability coverage can be increased on renters insurance for a home for very little money. You’ll find that increasing personal property coverage is often not expensive, either. There is one more change you should make, however. Medical payments to others is a no fault coverage designed to quickly resolve small injuries suffered by guests on your premises. Now that you have a yard and other risks that you didn’t have before, you can generally increase medical payments coverage to $5,000 for just a few dollars a year.
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 get started, just call (800)892-4308 or click to get covered - whether you need Brownsville, TX renters insurance quotes online or coverage anywhere else!
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