Protecting Your Valuables: The Two Step Solution

It’s the holidays! And you bought that “special someone” a certain piece of bling that they’ve been hinting at for the past year. What happens if that item is lost or stolen? Do you have it insured properly?

On Homeowners and Renters Insurance policies you can “schedule” or list out specific items to be covered. This applies to jewelry and other items such as fine arts, antiques, even wine collections. If you don’t schedule an item, the policy deductible will apply. After the deductible is satisfied, then you have another problem – special limits of liability. Most Homeowners and Renters Insurance policies have special limits on valuable articles such as jewelry. For example, your $5K ring gets stolen. Let’s say you have a Homeowners policy with a $1K deductible and a $1K special limit on jewelry: In this case, the policy will only pay up to a $1K for that loss. So, here’s the solution:

1.       Get an appraisal for any item you want listed. An appraisal is so important because it provides the value of the item and will assist the insurance company in the event of a loss. 

2.       Choose your deductible. Did you know that you can have a zero-dollar deductible on scheduled items?  Let’s go back to that $5K ring that was stolen earlier. In this case, if it was scheduled with a zero-dollar deductible, you can now recover the full appraised value of that item. As you can see there is a BIG difference between “scheduling” and not scheduling.

In our example, a difference of $4000!

The typical cost to schedule an item is $10 per thousand in value. In this case scheduling the $5K ring would cost approximately $50 per year.

So now that you know the facts, are your valuables insured properly? Contact your agent if you have any questions.  ~ Logan Kirk

Logan Kirk, Insurance Advisor