Better review your home insurance now! Sandy’s done. So is the Waldo and High Park Fires and hopefully the hail season! But now it will get cold, pipes will freeze and some of us will have more claims.

When is the last time you sat down with your agent for a review of your home insurance? If you have to file a claim you need to help your insurance company understand your entire loss so they can compensate you for those losses covered under your policy. Inventory, photos, etc. are key to the process, but most important part of this is the part about “Losses covered under your policy”. If it’s not covered, you can’t get compensated and the only way you can know if it’s covered is to know your policy through frequent reviews with your agent.

I’m in the middle of my third year in agency and chat with other agents with 30 and 40 years’ experience. Frequently we all learn something that is newly interpreted as being covered under the policy. On the other side, things you have taken for granted as being covered, might not be. The only way to know for sure is to ask your agent. And the more times your review your home insurance with me the more we learn about things that might have been overlooked last time we chatted! I get questions all the time. Some I can answer, some I have to call the underwriter. But either way, it’s better to ask the question, than have that $5,000 bronze sculpture you’ve gust placed in your water feature destroyed by the tree falling on it and find your policy has a $1,500 per item of art work limit unless it’s scheduled! Call me, I’ll come out anytime and run through your coverage.

So now you have a claim. Under your responsibility are ‘all reasonable efforts to ensure further damage does not occur’. This could be a simple as throwing a tarp over a broken window to calling every disaster restoration company and plumber in the book until you find one that can come out and shut of you water because the pipe broke and the valve was rusted and broke off when you tried to shut it off yourself!

RMII has a great little Claims guide here you can download.

As ever call me anytime you have a question, day or night and every time you think you might have a claim!.