Protecting your most valuable possessions
Once you know your home insurance policy is up to date and gives you the protection you need, it’s easy to simply forget about it. After all, it’s all sorted, so you can relax with peace of mind. Right?
Actually, you need to review your home insurance on a regular basis, to make sure your policy still covers everything you ned it to and that it's up to date. And that’s particularly true if you buy or are given something valuable, like jewellery or a piece of art.
Prized – and pricey – possessions
Standard home insurance policies from a reputable provider like us, should already include a decent level of protection for your items. For example, our home insurance contents policy includes new for old replacement on damaged or stolen items, excluding clothing or household linen over 3 years old. Plus, you also get accidental damage cover for electrical equipment like TVs and computers, and help with identity theft, though terms and conditions apply.
However, most policies also require that items worth more than a certain amount are declared separately. With our policy, you can add high-risk items worth more than £1,500. By high risk items, we mean things such as jewellery, watches or artwork – but it’s important to mention anything that’s portable and particularly valuable.
It means you can relax knowing your most precious possessions are protected if anything bad happens.
What about sentimental value?
Of course, no amount of money can make up for losing a piece of jewellery or other item that has enormous sentimental value. However, we'll help you as much as possible following a loss or theft, including having a precious piece of jewellery recreated. Of course, it would still be upsetting to lose the item, but you'll at least have a replica to enjoy and pass down to the next generation.
Just one important point – it’s always worth keeping receipts and any information you have about items of particular value. This is another reason to take photographs of anything special – to make sure a particular item can be recreated as accurately as possible.
Okay, what about high risk items worth less than that?
Just because a high risk item, such as a piece of jewellery, art or a valuable collection, isn’t worth as much as £1,500 doesn’t mean it’s not valuable to you. Most standard home contents policies do protect high risk items that aren’t named, as long as they don’t exceed a certain value individually or collectively.
For example, if you have contents cover for a home with up to three bedrooms then our policy may pay out up to 20% of the total sum insured for high risk items. If your home has four or five bedrooms then up to 30% of the sum insured may be paid out for high risk items.
To make sure a claim goes smoothly, it’s a really good idea to keep receipts and photographs of particular items of value, so you’re able to replace them as quickly as possible.
Also, when you’re working out the value of your home contents, don’t forget to include items of jewellery that you routinely wear – if you never take them off then it can be easy to overlook them when you’re pricing up your possessions.
Talk to us
If you want to discuss a new policy that protects all your most valuable items give our team a call on 0800 561 0711. If you're already a customer and you want to chat about your cover and whether it’s enough, you can call our customer services team on 0345 234 0117.