Today’s renters insurance question comes from Steve, who has renters insurance in Austin, TX:
Why is renters insurance expensive?
Why is renters insurance expensive? Well, expensive is relative. A diamond is expensive. Buying a pony is expensive. Paying fifteen dollars a month to protect all the things you own might not be expensive.

Why Is Renters Insurance Expensive?
That’s another one we get frequently. It’s also a question that badly needs to be put in perspective. Diamonds are expensive. Having a pony is expensive. A trip to Hawaii is expensive. Losing everything you own to a fire or a drunk driver crashing through your living room is expensive.
Renters insurance is not expensive. It never was, and it never will be.
When you ask why is renters insurance expensive, you’re looking at it from the wrong angle.
Think about it from a cost/benefit standpoint. If you pay $15 a month for nearly a century, and you live that long, and you never have a single property loss, you will come out even. If you only live another 80 years and have one personal property loss in your lifetime, renters insurance is not expensive. It’s far less than the cost to resolve that one issue.
When you ask why is renters insurance expensive, you also forget about the other things that come with it besides personal property coverage.
If a covered loss keeps you from staying in your home, renters insurance can pay for temporary accommodations like a hotel until the apartment is livable again.
Why is renters insurance expensive? Picture this: You’re walking down the street, minding your own business, reading a text and not paying much attention. You bump into someone accidentally and knock him down. When he goes down, he falls through the glass of a shop window.
Guess who’s responsible for that.
Not the shop owner. His suddenly anthropomorphic glass window did not sprout legs and jump on the other guy. The other guy isn’t responsible either. Intentionally or not, you bumped into him and pushed him into that window. That makes you 100% responsible for his medical bills, etc.
Those thousands of dollars for which you’re now responsible would be covered by your renters insurance liability coverage. So let’s ask again, why is renters insurance expensive? Because it can save you thousands or hundreds of thousands in liability and personal property losses. For fifteen bucks a month, that sounds like a pretty good deal to us.
For more information on why renters insurance is expensive (or more correctly, why renters insurance is so cheap), call Effective Coverage at (800) 892-4308 or click above for an instant, free online renters insurance quote!