Understanding your Florida Homeowners Insurance Policy
Not all homeowners policies are exactly the same. It’s really a misconception that there are these generic homeowners policies. There are differences, and those differences can be critical to your financial protection. What you need to know is that there are choices to be made. When dealing with an agent or an agency, those choices should be presented to you. There are some common threads in every policy. This is coverage for your home itself, the structure. There is coverage for all of your personal belongings inside your house, or even outside your hose that are not structural. There is a coverage, that most people don’t even think about or realize called loss of use. If your house were to burn down or damaged badly, and you have nowhere to live, it’s going to cost you extra to go somewhere else.
There is a value on how much coverage you get, and there are some choices to be made there, but that coverage is in most policies. There is also coverage for liability, and that actually can be a very big, significant coverage. When you are in your automobile, you have to have an auto policy to protect you there from a liability standpoint. If you are in a profession, and there is a liability issue with your profession, then of course you have to have a professional liability policy. Anything else that goes on in your life where you can be sued, which can be lots of things and I will speak to those in just a second, but that’s where you draw protection from your homeowners policy, your personal liability, and most people don’t realize what a significant item that is.
Now you also need to understand that in every policy there are limitations or exclusions. What you need to know is that a homeowners policy is not a maintenance policy, it’s to protect you, protect your home financially, if something happens – we call those perils, whether it is wind, or fire or any other thing that you possibly could think about. It is designed to protect sudden and accidental events, not just wear and tear. You need to know if you have sinkhole coverage on your policy, not everybody has that anymore. Do you have special items? Like lots of jewelry or silverware, or do you have a gun collection, or maybe you have some antiques, or a book collection or lots of different things that may not be inherently covered or covered adequately on your homeowners policy. You need to be aware of that – there are limitations on those coverage’s on every policy.
You may just have some unique things that are really important to you involving you home. You need to address those things, because they may or may not be covered. Of course your liability coverage, which I spoke to earlier for example, some liability policies - if you have a dog and your dog were to bite somebody, there may be no coverage, there might be, but you need to know. When you think about a homeowners policy, for most people your home is the most significant financial investment that you have and your homeowners policy is how you protect that investment. You need to deal with it and look at it carefully and realize you have choice and make wise choices that best fit you.
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