Costs of living around the country are increasing, and as a homeowner, it seems financially irresponsible to not purchase insurance. That being said, your home is the biggest and perhaps most costly investment you will ever make in your lifetime. Thus, it only makes practical sense to protect your investment with insurance. In fact, many homeowners around the globe are already doing so. Here are some reasons why this type of insurance is important.
Property insurance offers coverage against many disasters including, but not limited to, floods, fires, earthquakes and other weather-related damages. Regardless of your homes size, location, and other security features that you may have added, no property is invulnerable to fires, floods, or burglaries.
In some cases, the land your property is built on can also erode and send your home crashing down. A less known benefit of property insurance policies is its liability coverage clause. Sure, being a careful homeowner can help prevent a lot of accidents and injuries, but an incident could include your neighbours or your neighbour’s home. Liability coverage can help protect against these potentially costly incidents.
For homeowners who have expensive jewellery, art pieces, or other valuable possessions in their home, will be required to insure these items under a specific section rather than under general contents. Furthermore, cover can also be extended to include specific items to be covered outside of the home.
These are just some of the many things that household insurance can protect you from. Note that not all insurance policies are cut from the same cloth. You’ll want to sit down and discuss specific coverage features that work best for your property and personal circumstances.
Smoke alarms alert – are landlords keeping up with the law?
Over two million homes in England – that’s almost one in 10 – do not have a working smoke alarm according to a survey covering all tenures of property.
And only a quarter of landlords and owner occupiers with an alarm test it every month.
The Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Alarm Regulations 2015, said that private sector landlords are required from 1 October 2015 to have at least one smoke alarm installed on every storey of their properties and carbon monoxide alarms in any room containing a solid fuel burning appliance. The landlord must also make sure the alarms are in working order at the start of each new tenancy.
The Local Government Association, which represents councils and fire authorities in England, says autumn poses a potentially greater fire risk as this is when people typically start to use heaters and open fires, and cook hot food, which is likely to be in greater numbers with more people working from home due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Latest government figures for 2018/19 show that nine per cent of households in England – the equivalent of 2.17m – do not have a working smoke alarm and only 26 per cent of people who own an alarm test it at least once a month.
This is despite experts calculating that people are around eight times more likely to die in a fire in a home with no working smoke alarm.
Did you know that is also a requirement of most insurance policies to have working smoke alarm installed in line with the above regulations? If you do not have these in place your insurance policy may be invalid.
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