Choose the Best Home Insurance Company
Your personal best home insurance coverage will evolve over the years. Trying to keep your coverage forever “optimized” is a lot like trying to find highest point on a sand dune that’s perpetually buffeted by high winds. Sure, you may be able to with a ton of effort) locate a “best fit” solution. But unforeseen events can easily and radically alter your insurance calculus. Today’s “best home insurance” solution may be tomorrow’s so-so solution. For instance, your credit score can change, you may get married or divorced, you may purchase a new automobile, you may install a new sprinkler system, you may suffer a break in or a busted pipe, and so on. All of these dynamic factors can change your needs, screw up your budget, and perhaps even fundamentally change the way you view risk.
What Can Be Done
Forget about isolating the best home insurance and seek the “good enough” insurance. This isn’t to say that you should lower your standards. Rather, it’s to say that you should find a satisfactory solution that protects and avoids excessive budgetary waste. To that end, below are some tips about how to get your rates down and simultaneously tailor your policy, so that it really is the best home insurance that you can reasonably expect to have.
Maximize Savings with Minimal Effort
Take a beat to explore the full pantheon of discounts that may be available to you. If you are a retiree over 55 years of age, you can get a senior discount, for instance. Consider making home improvements, such as installing storm proof windows, fixing up your dilapidated roof, putting in sprinkler and burglar alarm systems, and getting rid of potential dangerous nuisances, such as trampolines and open air swimming pools. If you really want to dive deep here, you can get everyone in your family to quit smoking. Insurers charge smokers more because they present a greater fire hazard. Also, consider setting aside a fund to pay for home repairs, so that you can opt for a very high deductible and thus save on your premiums).
Tailoring Coverage to Get the Best Home Insurance
Some homeowners prefer to live on the edge –opting for little or no insurance in the hopes that good fortune will see them through. Statistically, however, from a pure “game theory” standpoint, this is a bad idea. Let’s say you own a $10,000 diamond engagement ring. You refuse to add it to your policy because you want to keep your rates low. This works fine for 9 years, but on the 10th year, you lose your ring while on a trip to Madrid. The cost of replacing that ring extrapolated over that 10 year period would be about $1,000 a year –far less than what you would have paid, had you opted for insurance. Obviously, there is no guarantee that you will lose your ring within 10 years. But say the probability of doing so is 25%. That means that an appropriate policy to mitigate this risk would be around $250 a year worth of insurance. Of course, this is a rough example to illustrate a general point; namely, to tailor your coverage, you want to look deeply at specific risks –and you want to look at risks in probabilistic terms.
Colleting Quotes to Assess Your Best Home Insurance Options
Once you’ve completed a little soul searching about your risk tolerance and best home insurance preferences, it is time to collect and analyze quotes from top insurers. Do that right here through NetQuote. Our online service is free and fast. Simply answer a few basic questions, and you will get back at least five quotes chosen from a pool of over a hundred nationwide insurers.
See how much you could save today on your home insurance. Get your free home insurance quotes today!
