Happy Valentines Day! Wishing you all a very blessed time to celebrate love. This is a time of year that you may purchase or receive gifts that you might want to insure separately. I wonder how many of you have been affected by losing the main diamond out of your wedding ring? (I have!)
Several years ago, I was getting ready for a foster care placement and was making up bunk beds before our inspection and I looked down and saw that my diamond was missing. I took the beds all apart, trying to find it, but I never did. This is where scheduled personal property coverage can come in handy.
While your homeowners policy may cover valuables and other personal property when lost, stolen, or damaged, it may not cover the full value. Also, especially in this market, you want to avoid filing a small claim on your home insurance.
When you have a scheduled items policy, you itemize each article. These policies typically have no deductible. This makes it easy to cover the loss of something like a diamond. If the item is not scheduled, you have limited coverage under your homeowners policy and it is subject to your homeowners deductible.
The beauty of scheduling items is that they are covered for their replacement value – with no deductible.
What items can be scheduled?
Jewelry is what people often think of when it comes to insuring personal property. Interestingly, you can now even cover your wine or bourbon collection.
Other common items that you can schedule: antiques, cameras, coins, fine art, guns, musical Instruments, rare books, real silverware, sports memorabilia, stamps, and other collectibles.
Why should you consider scheduling items?
- Typically, scheduled personal property policies have no deductible, versus a homeowners deductible.
- A claim would go against that policy not your homeowners policy, which can prevent having an incident on your home insurance history which can affect future home insurance premiums. Remember, a claim is a claim no matter how small.
- You get the full replacement value.
- No question on how much the claim will be settled for it’s whatever amount is listed when you scheduled it.
- Some extremely valuable items have a replacement cost that is more than the sublimit on your homeowners policy for such an item.
How does it work?
A bill of sale or a recent appraisal may be all we need to show the proper insurance value for most items.
If you collect similar items, like baseball cards that you have a lot of, we can even do a blanket policy for the total. This way, when you buy and sell individual items we don’t need to add or subtract, however we may need to change the total value.
You can use both a schedule and blanket depending on the items you have. For example, you have one baseball card valued at $100,000 and the rest total combined value is a blanketed $50,000.
I suggest having any valuable scheduled items reappraised approximately every five years. You should also review your scheduled items before renewal every year to make sure it is up to date and correct.
We’d love to hear from you – please reach out! We are here to help.
