Home insurance UK: choosing the best deal

There are two kinds of home insurance UK providers offer. Buildings insurance covers the static elements of your home – the bricks and mortar and the fittings – against structural damage from acts of God such as lightning, flooding, fire, showers of frogs and locusts (well, maybe not the last two). Contents insurance protects, as the name suggests, the contents of your home from similar natural disasters and burglary. Both kinds of home insurance UK wide are important to get, but buildings insurance is absolutely essential and will be required from most if not all mortgage lenders. In the unlikely but catastrophic event that the structure of your house was destroyed, it would pay for rebuilding. And it’s not a bad thing if you are obliged to get buildings insurance because it removes the temptation not to: if you didn’t have it and something happened, you would not only have to pay for a new house and find temporary accommodation but keep up the mortgage repayments on the old building. Even if you could meet it, that financial burden would exponentially increase the already stressful situation of losing a home.

Both buildings and contents insurance have limitations and conditions which you should check before you take out the policy and remember to abide by when you do have it. For example, your contents policy may stipulate that every entrance to your house is secured while you are not there – a single open window could invalidate it. Also check whether your policy has a single article limit, as most do. This will mean that anything worth more than ₤1000 or so has to be specifically declared.

It’s a harsh fact that some insurers aim to take advantage of consumer apathy by raising home insurance premiums from year to year, sometimes by unreasonable margins. There are three ways to react to this. One: let the insurer get away with it by coughing up the extra money. Two: stop paying for the insurance altogether. Three: shop around for a better deal. As we said above, buildings insurance is not a legal requirement in the UK but most if not all mortgage lenders will insist on it. However, contents insurance is wholly voluntary and in this case the option of doing without it regularly proves too great a temptation for some. It’s easy to see why because it doesn’t seem like a vital part of life. The odds on something really serious happening – a storm, a fire, a bad burglary – are generally small. But the relative unlikeliness of disaster has to be weighed up against the extent of the predicament faced if it does happen. Losing one’s possessions and the hard work invested in decorating a house is traumatic enough without having to pay to replace it all. Is that a gamble that anyone should really take?

Try http://www.moneysupermarket.com/insurance/ to compare quotes for home insurance UK wide, and online consumer magazines and newspaper articles to research companies The Guardian and Telegraph websites, www.guardian.co.uk and www.telegraph.co.uk, are excellent. The free archive access they provide is a privilege which you won’t find on any national American newspaper. The Association of British Insurers (www.abi.org.uk) also provides useful advice, and if you have a complaint you can go to the Financial Ombudsman. This site provides an outline of what kind of home insurance UK providers offer plus information about the subject as a whole and ideas on how to get the best deal. Good luck.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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