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The need for home insurance is critical. The risk of losing one’s home or the myriad of valuable items inside it can be both mentally and financially catastrophic. However, at the very least the financial burden can be minimized by having proper home insurance. While you may feel the risk is minimal, an incident need only occur once to have serious consequences on the rest of your life.

Nevertheless, paying a high monthly insurance premium may be its own headache when considering the multitude of expenses already attached to your home. Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to reduce the cost of home insurance, while still having the protection you need. The following are 5 such tips for saving money on your home insurance:

1. Increase Your Deductible

Naturally, the easiest way to reduce your insurance premium is to increase the amount you are liable for. If your environment is low risk, and the items you wish to ensure are expensive, it makes sense to have a high deductible. Most home insurance deductibles begin at $500. Raising that figure to $1000 or even $3000 could result in saving about 20 to 25 percent on your rate, based on recent statistics.

This will mean you will be responsible for slightly more of the cost should a disaster occur. However, raising your deductible is an excellent way to lower the cost of monthly premiums, while still providing the security of being protected from financial ruin. The difference between $500 and $3000 may seem large, but both are paltry sums compared to the cost of your home.

2. Buy Insurance Bundles

These days, many insurance companies offer products that cover multiple industries, such as homeowners, commercial, and automotive insurance. Purchasing your insurance through the same carrier can result in a hefty discount on both premiums. Although you will lose some flexibility in terms of being able to shop around, generally if you are satisfied with a company with regard to one service, you will have little trouble utilizing their other insurance products. Research which companies have the best home and auto insurance bundles before you commit.

3. Insure Only Your Home and Not the Land Beneath It

Often times homeowner’s do not realize that the most valuable part of their property is not the home, but the land it sits on. Moreover, they conflate the two when they apply for insurance, using the sale price of their property to calculate their premium.

This is a mistake, especially when you consider that the land will likely not be damaged in the event of a disaster. Only the cost of rebuilding the home should be factored when calculating your insurance premium, a number which is precipitously less than the sale price. Doing so should lower your premiums substantially as opposed to insuring the land and the house.

4. Discounts

There are an abundance of home insurance discounts that you may not be aware of, such as reductions for being a senior, not smoking in the home, or remaining a loyal customer. Asking your insurance agent about such packages could be useful in lowering your insurance.

5. Preventative Measures

Taking safety measures in the home will lower your overall risk, and lower risk to the insurer means better premiums. Some of the security and preventative measures you can take are adding additional smoke detectors, installing a high-end security system, installing storm shutters, deadbolt locks, and fire-retardant roofing.

Clearly you’ve heard about the current economic climate, with banks failing or losing their credit ratings, big countries on the verge of going bankrupt, masses of government debt, etc. You’ve definitely heard it all. As a result, investors have become incredibly worried about what the world economy will look like over the next 5 years.

Consequently, it’s no surprise that there’s been an big increase with investing in valuable metals, such as silver, gold, palladium, and platinum. But why are investors so interested in metals? What is it about these metals that attract so much interest?

If you think about it, 99.9% of all investments are based on some concept, rather than an actual object. e.g. company shares don’t actually exist (not even on paper these days), they’re just a culmination of the perception of that company and how well they are doing. So the intrinsic share value is not based on anything physical. It’s not to say that shares are worthless, quite the contrary, just that they’re not a physical object.

Therefore the point is that investors like to think of their investments as something tangible. Metals are physical objects, and actually exist in the real world. Property exists in the real world, but decreasing house prices mean that investors are not investing in property anymore. Additionally, property is not a liquid asset, simply meaning it takes a long time to sell a property. Comparatively, selling metal is very easy and can be done within minutes.

A combination of metal being a real-world object, and being very easy to sell, precious metals such as gold are very attractive investment assets. If you think about it, gold has always been a desirable and attractive possession throughout the ages. However, there’s another fact that completes the reasoning why gold in particular has become so popular in the last 12 months. Gold is a scarce resource, and it’s increasingly tough to find. Gold isn’t really being mined anymore, it’s being chemically extracted. Therefore the gold we have now is pretty much all that we will have. Gold has always been a finite resource.

So why is gold so popular right now? It’s easy to sell, it’s easy to buy, it’s generally held it’s value over the years. Gold is being seen as a currency-neutral form of investment where its value is not subject to the media-induced hype facing our economies at the moment. If you can keep your gold secure, it’s definitely a safe place for your money at the moment.

This is a guest article by Mike Stirling who researches the precious metal markets, particularly the currently-increasing scrap gold prices.