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Home insurance is a vital component of any home owner’s finances. However, many people still dismiss the benefits of such a policy, mainly due to the cost and the admin work involved when making a claim. As minor damages are usually dealt with and paid by the home owner independently to avoid the tedious process of making a claim, many assume that home insurance is unnecessary. However, this couldn’t be further away from the truth.

Buying a property is already a huge investment. Couple that with the cost involved in maintaining it and you are faced with an incredibly expensive responsibility. Home insurance is designed to financially stabilise home owners and support them in the event of theft or damage. Finding a suitable and affordable home insurance quote is easier than you think. Due to the large number of providers, prices vary significantly from company to company.

Price comparison sites are particularly popular amongst insurance seekers across the country. Although these search engines are quick and easy to use, it is not advisable to accept a deal without visiting the insurance company directly first. Minor changes within the policy may occur which may mean that the cover is not specific or relevant for the home owner.

There are, however, other ways to ensure that you get a good deal:

1. Increase Security

Installing security and safety systems in and around the home will help bring premiums down. Insurance providers recognise the measures a property owner has taken to ensure they are both safe and protected. The ‘behaviours’ will be rewarded and thus monthly payments will be lowered.

2. Join Groups

Joining community groups can seriously boost the chances of receiving cheaper home insurance. Neighbourhood Watch programs are seen by insurers as a positive behavior that needs to be rewarded.

3. Review Contents

Expensive and sentimental belongings will all need to be covered by insurance to protect them against theft or damage. However, many people fail to inform insurers of changes in circumstance that can change the amount of monthly repayments. If a piece of jewellery, electronic device or appliance is no longer used or owned then providers need to be aware, otherwise they will continue to charge for those contents.

4. Increase the Deductible

The deductible in insurance is the amount of money that is needed to be paid before a claim can be made. The general theory is that the higher the deductible the lower the monthly payments. For those who decide to pay for minor repair work with their own earnings, this is ideal. In some cases, households can save up to $200 a year.

5. Combining Policies

Contacting an existing provider of insurance is a sure fire way of improving the likelihood of a discount. Most companies will reward existing customers with a substantial reduction on their policy if they combine two or more types of insurance with them. For this reason, existing providers should be the first port of call when gathering home insurance quotes.

This is a guest post by Nicola Winters on behalf of LV, a leading provider of home insurance.

Before you can find the best life insurance quotes, you may need to reflect on what it is that you mean by best.

For example, are the best life insurance quotes those that are the cheapest or would you consider a policy which offered the highest lump sum pay out, to be the best?

Types of cover

While the basic principle of a lump sum payment to your family should you die remains the same, there are different types of life insurance policy available. There are also a number of ways that you may typically tailor the type you choose to match your own particular set of circumstances.

So, for example, you may opt for a policy that has:

• a lump sum payout, which decreases over time to tie in with a repayment type mortgage where the balance outstanding also decreases with each repayment you make – this is a decreasing term policy.

• a lump sum agreed at the outset of the policy and which doesn’t change over time – this is called a level term policy.

It may be worth noting that for either of these options, the monthly premium is likely to remain the same over the term of the policy.

You may also be able to combine this type of cover with critical illness insurance, which may provide a lump sum in the event that you are diagnosed with a life threatening illness.

Options

Once you have chosen the type of cover that you’d like, you may then need to choose:

• how long to you want the cover to last (the term of the policy) and this might correspond to the length of time your mortgage has to run or how long you have until you retire etc.

• the amount of cover you want (the size of the lump sum) – again, this may be tied into the amount of mortgage you have outstanding or an amount to provide your family with a bit extra once all the major bills were taken care of.

Premium prices will vary depending on the options that you select.

There’s nothing quite like a big, beautiful new home. It may be a life’s dream come true, your very own personal paradise. With the new home, however, come a few issues you must deal with. The best way of preventing a dream home from becoming a nightmare is to make sure your new palace is well protected by insurance. The best way to start looking at ways of protecting your home is with a good home and contents insurance quote. You can cover everything, easily, if you know how.

Home and contents insurance issues

Big home insurance needs to be considered systematically. It involves a range of basic areas to be covered:

• Building insurance: A big home is also a big building. They’re expensive to build, and they’re also expensive to repair. You need to cover the value of the building on a realistic cost basis to cover damage.

• Temporary accommodation: If your home needs repairs, you may need somewhere to live during the repair process. Good insurance policies can provide this coverage for up to 12 months.

• Legal liability insurance: This type of insurance is an absolute must for any property owner. Any accident or other incident on your property can expose you to major legal liabilities. An absolute minimum of $10,000,000 legal liability coverage is considered by experts the sum required to provide basic cover, and preferably more than that figure.

• Contents: Big homes can include a very large amount of contents, including a lot of expensive items like electronics, white goods and other high value domestic contents. Contents values tend to accumulate over time, and maintaining adequate coverage is important. It’s also extremely important to keep track of replacement cost values. (See also Theft, below.)

• Fire: A common cause of property damage, fires can be extremely expensive. An accidental kitchen fire can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars. Fire insurance is an essential part of any good home and contents insurance policy.

• Theft: Theft is one of the most basic areas to cover with any insurance policy. The fact is that theft can be one of the most expensive of all losses, and if you’ve got a lot of valuable contents, the risks increase substantially.

Please note: It’s strongly advised to make sure you keep your policy’s coverage up to date with the value of your contents.

• Accidental damage: Broken windows, accidental damage to a garage door, you name it, the costs of repairs can be considerable. Big window areas can be extremely costly to replace, and it really is adding insult to injury to take more damage to your wallet.

Insurance for a big new home is very like business risk management. You take out insurance cover to deal with known costs and values. You can insure your wonderful new home very effectively, and make sure you’re not vulnerable to the massive financial hits legal liability, property losses and damage can cause. Keep your policy up to date, upgrade your cover when required, and you’ll never need to worry about these problems.

If you run a home business, home insurance may not be the main thing on your mind at the moment. You’re probably very busy just keeping the wheels turning, and there are other priorities. OK, but there’s something you need to know. As a home business, you really do need home insurance, and plenty of it, for business reasons. It’s when things go wrong that the situation can get very tricky indeed, and you need to know what to do.

The tricky side of insuring your business

Insuring a home business is simple enough. It’s very similar to basic home insurance, but with a few added issues you need to address.
For example: Did you know that if you invite a client for a business lunch in a café, and he slips over and breaks an arm, you can be sued? It may not be your fault, the restaurant may be held liable, and the court may see things that way, but you can theoretically be held liable, because the client was there doing business with you.

A similar court case happened in Australia a few years ago. This case happened to affect a person who was under a Department of Education and Workplace Relations (DEWR) training scheme, and they were sued rather than the trainee, who was conducting business under their training scheme. The result was that DEWR issued a new policy requiring all their future students to get liability insurance.

Not quite what you’d expect, is it? The situation with home insurance for home businesses and self-employed people generally is that almost anything directly related to your home business can be a personal legal liability under various circumstances. You need liability cover. You also need some sort of protection for the legal fees.

Home business insurance issues

Your home business is your breadwinner, and it’s also holding a lot of your valuable equipment, files and other materials. If those materials get damaged or lost, particularly client materials under contract, you may incur liabilities. A client may need to sue, simply to recover costs of materials for which they may be liable. This can involve a lot more money than most people really want to think about, and cover is definitely preferable to no cover in these circumstances.

Contents insurance and home businesses

Contents insurance isn’t necessarily going to cover the value of some things in business, like lost business as a result of a fire, etc., but it can cover the value of a lot of very important things:

• Computers and peripherals

• Commercial materials

• Electrical equipment

• Desks, furniture, and similar contents

• Software

• Graphics materials

• Research materials

Please note:  The materials referred to here are normal household contents which would normally be part of a home and contents package. If you have high value business materials on the premises or additional business liabilities with high dollar values, you may need a dedicated business insurance package.

If you have a home business, you’re strongly advised to talk to an insurance consultant regarding your business needs. Insurance for home businesses isn’t particularly expensive. It’s also a lot cheaper than the liabilities.

Author: Emily

When it comes to protecting your family against the unthinkable, you have a choice between selecting many different types of life insurance. Two of the main types include Whole Life Insurance and Term Life Insurance. An insurance agent will be happy to sell you either type. After you read this article, you will know which type is better for you and which type is better for the insurance company. Before there is any life-changing crisis and the need for life insurance presents itself, it would be smart to become as informed as possible on these two types of life insurance.

What is Term Life Insurance?

In contrast to Whole Life, Term Insurance is strictly insurance. All of the money from your premium (less the obligatory fees for administering the program) goes directly toward insurance protection. Term life can have anywhere from a 1 to 30 year term. As long as you keep the policy in force, your coverage is in effect until the term expires. For example a 10 year term life policy will pay if you die within the 10 year term. If you do not renew or make other arrangements, once the 10 years are up, you are no longer covered.

What is Whole Life Insurance?

Whole life insurance has two components to it. An insurance component and an investment component. In a whole life policy, a portion of the premium is invested, building cash value as the policy matures. You will pay considerably more for a whole life policy as compared to Term Life. Depending upon their philosophy (life insurance companies tend to be conservative) the insurance company may buy money market funds, bonds or stocks. You can borrow against the cash value that accumulates over the years. Your monthly premium remains the same throughout the life of the policy. As long as you continue to pay your premiums, the policy stays in force regardless of any changes in your health.

Whole Life insurance policies can be either non-participating or participating. The greater majority of new Whole Life policies being written today are participating policies, which simply means that they have the flexibility to use the investment earnings in a variety of ways. Earnings (dividends) can be “spent” on increasing the cash value of the policy or decreasing the monthly premiums.

People who are conservative with their money and want reassurance that they are protected for life, might consider purchasing a whole life policy.

Cost of Term Versus Whole Life

In the final analysis, choosing one type of policy over the other comes down to cost. There is little argument that Whole Life is more expensive and you can get much better coverage for the same money with Term Insurance. Up front fees with Whole Life can take 2% or 3% right off the top. Lofty commissions charged by insurance agents will set you back further. Finally, the opportunity cost of entrusting a significant portion of your premium to management (Insurance Company) that has a historically poor record of performance, can be the biggest cost of all.

Suppose your monthly premium for a Whole Life policy was $300.00 per month of which $50.00 went towards insurance and $250.00 went toward investments. That totals $3,000.00 per year of investment money. Multiply that by years of paying premiums and you’re talking about a large amount of money. Conservative investments favored by insurance companies migh give you an average return of 2% -3%. You, the owner of the policy, have no control over how the money is invested.

If however, you were to invest that stash of money through a financial institution that is designed to maximize returns, and they perform with the market averages, you’d likely earn at least 7%-8%, over the extended period of time until the Whole Life policy was paid up. That can translate in to thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars of earnings lost by holding on to a Whole Life policy.

The amount of coverage one can get with Term Life versus Whole life, is dramatic. For around $50.00 per month or less, a healthy individual around 40 can get a million dollars of protection. For that same $50.00 per month, you would be lucky to get $100,000 of insurance protection.

The reason behind the huge discrepancy has been touched on before. Term life is insurance. Life insurance companies, using all sorts of statistics and actuarial tables, assign a risk for each individual in calculating

insurance rates. With Whole Life, an undisclosed portion of your total premium goes toward the investments made by the insurer. Management fees and who knows what else, is diverted away from the insurance aspect of the policy, resulting in less insurance coverage for greatly higher premiums.

When to Consider Term Life Insurance

Anytime you are looking for pure insurance, you will get more for your money by buying term insurance. If you have young children and want to protect them while they are still under your care and control, you might consider taking out a Term Life insurance policy. A 20 year, level premium Term policy will provide protection until they graduate from college and set out on their own.

Buying insurance for a focused purpose makes sense. Buying insurance with the goal of saving for your future (Whole Insurance) does not. If you want to invest for your future, set up an IRA and invest your money in diverse, quality mutual funds. If you want a little more aggressive approach you can buy or sell stocks, invest in gold or any number of available financial products. The point here being you have ownership and control of your investments.

When to Consider Buying Whole Life Insurance

When health or age reasons make it impossible to buy Term insurance, you can consider buying Whole Life. If you have an imminent need for coverage for what was an unforeseen development, you may benefit by having some coverage, albeit at a high premium.

Shop Around When Buying Term Life

Competition by all the major insurers to sell you a term life policy has caused a great deal of discrepancy in the price you may pay for Term Life. Going online, you might find the exact coverage priced in a range that differs by several hundred dollars.

To be sure, there is a need for life insurance. Planning ahead, you can put in place a policy that will insure your family can maintain their accustomed lifestyle upon your demise. Now that you know the features of Whole Life and Term Life, you can make an intelligent decision on the right policy for you.