Basic home insurance provides coverage for disasters such as fire, hurricane damage, lightning and any others covered by your policy, but basic coverage might not protect from every potential loss. Most home insurance plans do offer a wide variety of optional coverage to help meet your home insurance needs.
Here are eight types of optional coverage you could purchase with your basic home insurance.
1) The first place to look for extra coverage is for any natural disaster left uncovered in your home insurance policy that is likely to befall your home. This includes flood insurance, earthquake insurance and wind insurance if you live in areas where this is not part of standard home insurance.
2) Guaranteed replacement cost is the most comprehensive home insurance you can purchase. To buy this level of home insurance you need to meet specific rules and conditions, and you will most likely pay premiums that increase with the cost of inflation.
3) To increase your level of theft protection, you can buy theft coverage protection endorsement. With this home insurance option possessions in your motor vehicle, trailer or watercraft have coverage even without proof of forcible entry.
4) You can add optional coverage to your home insurance to protect your money, securities, banking and credit cards. Increasing your limits on money and securities does just that – it increases the coverage on money, bank notes, deeds and other securities. Credit card forgery and depositors forgery coverage endorsement gives you protection against loss, theft and unauthorized use of your credit cards, as well as coverage for a banking forgery.
5) Inflation guard endorsement allows your home insurance provider to automatically increase your coverage to meet a rising cost of inflation. You will eventually pay a higher premium, but not until your policy is renewed.
6) If you have high dollar items such as furs, stamp or coin collections, guns, antiques or other items that might exceed your regular home insurance policy, you will want to take a scheduled personal property endorse – also known as a personal article floater – on these items.
7) If you own a vacation home or other secondary residence you will likely want to add a secondary residence premises endorsement to your basic home insurance.
8) Similar to the secondary residence endorsement, if you own a small sailboat or outboard motor boat you will want a watercraft endorsement added to your basic home insurance for the personal liability coverage this option provides.
