Indiana Home Insurance Quotes: The Way to Save
Indiana home insurance is not a favorite pastime for most Hoosier residents, but it may be one of the most important purchases you’ll ever make. Being a homeowner in this market is risky enough, but to fail to protect one of your biggest personal assets is to ask for financial calamity. If you have a mortgage on the property, your lending institution is likely to require that you buy home insurance. To get the most for your insurance dollar, you need to take the time to understand the basics of home insurance as well as solicit multiple Indiana insurance quotes.
Average Cost of Indiana Home Insurance Quotes
According to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the average cost of Indiana home insurance was $638 in 2006, the last year for which comprehensive data is available. This puts Indiana just outside the top ten states for cheapest home insurance and well ahead of the national average of $804 for the same year. It’s easy to assume that a general lack of natural disasters creates these lower premium rates, but most home insurance policies don’t cover these types of perils without a supplemental rider. In fact, the biggest factor that drives down costs is probably the homes themselves. Indiana has among the cheapest home values in the entire country. Even during the peak of the housing bubble in 2006, the median sales price for a home in Indiana was about $64,000, second lowest in the country next to Kansas.
It’s easy to assume that location, home value, and insurance coverage are the only things that affect the cost of Indiana home insurance quotes, but other factors influence this cost. If you’ve made a claim on a home insurance policy in the past, you’re likely to have to pay more for coverage. Some homeowners who have made multiple claims can even be denied coverage altogether and are forced into the Indiana FAIR (Fair Access to Insurance Requirements) Plan, operated by the Indiana Basic Property Insurance Underwriting Association. Poor credit ratings can also affect your premiums.
Indiana Home Insurance Policies
It’s important that you understand how your home insurance policy works in particular what it does and doesn’t cover. The first type of home insurance policy, HO-1, covers 11 basic home perils: fire or lightning, windstorm or hail, explosions, riot or civil commotion, damage from aircraft, damage from vehicles, smoke damage, vandalism, theft, volcanic eruption, glass or safety-glazing material damage. HO-2 covers these 11 perils plus six others: frozen pipes, accidental discharge of water, falling objects, snow/ice/sleet damage, electrical surge damage, and rupture or bursting of steam or hot water heating systems. HO-3 is the most popular type of home insurance policy, and it’s the easiest to understand because it covers anything not listed as an exclusion in the policy. Note, however, that there are a couple things commonly in these exclusions such as natural disasters, power failure, war, nuclear events, governmental action, and fraud. In Indiana, you should pay particularly close attention to natural disasters. Homeowners who live in a floodplain, for example, usually need to buy supplemental flood insurance.
Shopping for Indiana Home Insurance Quotes
Indiana home insurance quotes are easy to find but hard to shop for. You can readily find a home insurance company by sifting through the local phonebook, but cold-calling an insurance agent or walking into the local office already surrenders the biggest advantage you have a consumer. Getting online Indiana home insurance quotes is the best way to increase competition amongst insurers who will know they’re up against other companies when you use NetQuote to generate home insurance quotes. Better yet, you can review these quotes and compare different home insurance policies from the comfort of your home. Let us do the legwork so you can focus your time on making the decision possible for your home and your loved ones.
