Who Needs Home Insurance and Why?
Buying your own home is a very exciting and joyful experience, especially when it's your very first home. The anticipation of finally moving into your own place, choosing everything according to your taste, and furnishing it exactly as you like without having to negotiate with the actual owners of the apartment/house or other parties involved, is certainly a wonderful and fun undertaking. However, all of this can be dampened by the fact that buying a home also comes with several obligations that you don't think about at first glance.
One of these is taking responsibility for your home, which includes dealing with local issues as well as compensating for any damage caused by your home to potential third parties. These could be, for example, a broken window pane, which unlike a rental apartment you now have to solve yourself, or water damage resulting from a leaking faucet that has reached the apartments of neighbors living on lower floors. In both cases, as an apartment owner you must take responsibility and find solutions to these problems.
To prevent such problems from growing out of hand, a good solution is to take out home insurance, which protects you in case of various accidents related to your home and household items. Depending on the additional risks coverage you choose, home insurance can also help in cases where, for example, your children have accidentally scratched a neighbor's car with their scooter, or if something happens to another family member's personal belongings. To protect against such incidents, it is important to add household contents additional risk with a sufficiently high insurance sum that would cover potential damages to specific items of property. This also includes various technological gadgets, clothing, school supplies, bicycles, and other personal items, provided that their material value has been confirmed in the policy before entering into the insurance contract. In this case, personal risks are somewhat lower and the joy of enjoying your own home along with everything that comes with it can be even greater.
In addition to protecting your household and portable property, liability insurance also plays a very important role alongside home insurance. This is an additional risk that comes to your aid when damage has occurred to third parties as a result of an incident originating from your insured apartment. Such situations can be very uncomfortable, especially when assessing the damage incidents you lack the knowledge and skills to properly evaluate both the severity of the specific situation and the extent of damage on both sides. In such situations, liability insurance additional risk concluded together with home insurance helps to better understand the extent of responsibility for the damage caused and clearly define it between all parties involved. It should be emphasized here that liability insurance may not only mean compensating neighbors in an apartment building for damage caused. Equally, liability insurance comes into play when a pedestrian slips and falls on the sidewalk in front of your house and gets injured, or when damage occurs to vehicles parked in front of your house due to snow or ice falling from the roof. Therefore, it would be worthwhile to carefully read through the conditions of the liability insurance additional risk before concluding the policy and choose the more precise coverage already according to your own domestic circumstances.
While taking out home insurance seems like quite a logical step when buying new developments, especially when it comes to property purchased with a home loan, where such insurance is mandatory, with older buildings its necessity is often called into question. In some cases, it may seem that such insurance is merely an additional expense, the necessity of which is not understood. In other cases, it may seem that even if some damage were to occur, the extent of possible damage would be so low that insurance would not be considered necessary to cover it.
Of course, there are also people who find any insurance unreasonable and see a much better solution in simply relying on good luck and believing that nothing will happen to them anyway. To answer both these people and actually those holding the first position, one can cite Murphy's Law, which suggests that in such cases one should certainly take out appropriate insurance. We have all heard the saying "knock on wood!" or "keep your fingers crossed!" and we also preventatively take an umbrella with us, which most of the time, perhaps precisely because of this, we don't need. Those who believe they would cover the costs of accidents themselves should be reminded that in most cases costs are not limited to purchasing new tiles, moldings, and other materials, but you also need to arrange for the necessary tools to remove the old items, install new ones, and if your own knowledge and skills are insufficient, you also have to pay for the work done by professionals in their field. As a result, the initial costs can turn out to be significantly more expensive.
From the above, it is important to emphasize that home insurance does not only cover mandatory insurance for a loan-purchased new living space, but it is a significantly broader coverage that also helps mitigate risks for owners of older houses and apartments. Therefore, when buying a home, it is certainly worth considering various home insurance options and taking out a policy that covers your specific wishes and needs.
You can familiarize yourself with BTA's various home insurance options here. For additional questions or to receive more personalized offers, please contact our specialists – [email protected] or call us at +372 5 68 68 668.
