Insuring Your Overseas Home

The number of UK residents how now have overseas homes is steadily on the increase. In some cases these overseas homes are for holiday purposes, such as with Spain, in other cases theyre bought for the purpose of spending at least part of the time of the owners retirement, such as with Cyprus. Either way, more often than not the British owner of the home would prefer not to have the overseas home insured by an offshore insurance provider, but rather by an insurance provider closer to home.

So, if you have an overseas home and would like a UK home insurance company to provide you with insurance, what can you expect to get?

Home Contents and Home Buildings Insurance

A number of providers of overseas home insurance policies have merged the home contents and home insurance policies to be an amalgamated overseas home insurance policy. This mega policy should cover you for both circumstances.

Public Liability Insurance

Should be a must, especially if you are considering renting the overseas home out for the part of the year that you are not there.

Lost Earnings

If you think that renting your overseas home about is going to be a major money spinner for you, you may well want to consider insuring yourself against any lost earnings. Basically, this insurance will reimburse you if your holiday tenants suddenly have to cancel.

Theft

As with mainland UK home insurance policies, you need to make sure you are protected against theft. All the usual precautions about invoicing your possession needs to be taken into consideration with your holiday home. Also, you need to check the excess deductibles carefully, as in most cases this can range from 50 – 200

Natural Disasters

As recent natural disaster such as the hurricanes, tsunami, and earth quakes have shown, certain geographical regions outside of the UK are more prone to natural disasters than the UK itself is. Consequently, you should make sure that your overseas home is adequately insured against this risk.

Insurance for your overseas home can be arranged cheaply over the internet, or else you can arrange to have the insurance provider by a specialist overseas home insurance company in your area. Do keep in mind that as this is effectively your second home, your home insurance premiums will be marginally higher than you may normally be expected to pay with the home you live in, especially if you are using the home in any way to generate income.

A Basic Guide To Home Contents Insurance

Basically, home contents insurance is insurance protection against the replacement cost that you would otherwise have to pay to replace the contents of your home in the event of then being lost, damaged or stolen. As is the case with home buildings insurance, the main factors contributing to grounds under which you can make a claim against your home contents insurance include theftburglary, damage due to floods, burst water pipes or boilers, etc.

There are, however, two very important factors that you need to keep in mind when insuring the contents of your home:

  • First, in the case of home contents insurance, it is rarely the case that your mortgage provider is going to insist that you have this type of insurance as part of your mortgage agreement;
  • Second, regardless of whether you own or rent the property you are currently living in, you should still be looking to insure the contents of your home as these are your personal possessions.

    Two further aspects of home contents insurance also need to be considered carefully when you are checking out the different kinds of policies on offer. In some, but not all, cases you can be insured for your home contents even when the items listed in your home contents insurance policy are not actually physically located on the home property. So, for example,

  • First, it is possible to claim when you are transporting items from one place to another and they are stolen.
  • Second, home contents insurance is insurance against the replacement cost of the item being insured.
    It does not, nor is it intended to, insure you against the nostalgic value of the item damagedlost. So, for example, if you insure a picture your deceased grandmother gave you, which would cost 20 to replace, it makes little difference that it was your deceased grandmother who gave it to you and that it cannot, therefore, be replaced.

    Although home contents insurance is, in all but a few very rare circumstances, a completely voluntary scheme of insurance to subscribe to, if you are in any doubt as to the value of this insurance scheme, take a quick mental inventory of the contents on your home and their value and then get a few quotes off the internet and youll soon be seeing the value of having your home contents properly insured.