The house opposite was burgled twice in September. No alarm. It happened on a Friday lunchtime. If they had an alarm, it may not have happened or I would have heard it go off and gone to look. My next door neighbours have cctv and gave the footage to the police. Two burglars were clearly visible but they’ve not been apprehended. The house now has an alarm, security lights, cctv, ring doorbell and a gate across the driveway preventing access to the rear of the house. They will probably never be burgled again.
Physical security is much better than alarms that are usually ignored anyway. Upgraded door and window locks is a good start.
CCTV may help provide evidence and is therefore more of a deterrent to thieves. Floodlights are good as thieves like to operate in the dark.
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Burglars generally look for easy targets, and will stake out an area looking for them. The trick is to make sure that you’re not the easest target in the street, without making your house look like Fort Knox which might give the impression that you’ve got lots of high value stuff hidden away.
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Just got ours sorted it’s gone up a bit 50% on last year but we’ve switched to more than- hifi is bundled in to the large amount of contents cover we have. Also have my electric wheelchair covered inside and outside the house now.
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Just renewed mine; for simplicity I only consider Unlimited Contents options. I have been with John Lewis, Hiscox and Home & Colonial in the past but changed to Aviva a few years ago. Hiscox were good but whacked up the mandatory excess too much for me. Aviva went up nearly 20% this time, which seemed high. However others inc. M&S were similar when I got quotes online. No discount when I called, but I have quite a few watches in the valuables cover, some of which have been discontinued and values had been increased year-on-year based on newer models. I changed the values to that of exact used replacements at dealer prices (e.g. Watchfinder) and this at least limited the increase to just over 10%. Aviva can give a discount if you have a pension with them, or travel or car insurance (provided of course those premia are competitive). As a rule legal cost cover separately is cheaper than adding it to car or home insurance, e.g. mine is £13/year. Mind you all insurance seems to be going up 20-30%: my car, motorbike and house all did. They came down with some arguing on the phone, but it shouldn’t be necessary!
But how do you tell which is a good insurer that will come good when the crunch comes?
Awesome thread: of course… now has me concerned for having not been insured for the last two decades… Hmm
And the better ones seem to cover household objects stolen from your purse when shopping…
Reason for shopping around and reading the fine print…
OK- story follows, but a similar story has been given elsewhere in this thread…
Yep - woefully underinsured; that was ME.
So my insurance was for the amount I had spent on the items, and was a ‘new for old’ policy.
This^^^
For me- it was the fact they took the remote control for the TV, and ‘not the TV’.
little parts that just don’t add up correctly when the payout requires buying silly things.
The ‘new for old’ was a double edged sword, the good was on the Computer,… a self built unit for peanuts that used a TV output card to avoid buying a monitor.
TV output cards were expensive and the insurer didn’t want to buy one,… until the computer store sent them an invoice including a monitor, and then they agreed, OK, TV output card…
Some interesting stuff were my gaming consoles were all imports, and the games were bought from a local VR cafe that also had an import cool stuff side to the business. It required membership, an ‘annual cost’… Whilst the insurer was willing to put a few thousand towards my gaming catalogue, the business owner had to make them buy me another years membership to be allowed to ‘spend the money’ with them. 
The thing that hurt me was my CD collection… all being second hand this time… (I’d been burgled a year earlier, sans insurance, and whilst I was never going to get back ‘autographed discs’ and ‘gold first pressings’, this time around I was covered…)
My replacement collection required buying from second hand stores, generally for less.
This really made me ‘underinsured’ as they insisted my ‘credit’ be used at a mainstream store. (that offered NOTHING I wanted, well ‘maybe a few’ “BEST OF” type CDs but none of the stuff I wanted to buy)…
The several thousand I had to spend in a mainstream store (at $30 a disc) didn’t net me back much of a collection, VS what $7-$15 a disc would have allowed me to buy at the second hand CD stores i had shopped at since the first burglary.
This is the real kicker affecting ALL OF US!
hifi is requiring much larger sums to buy ‘equivalent’ quality kit.
This is natural after any world financial crisis. (everything is built cheaper whilst costing more)…
One only has to look at the price point of the Nait Xs/Xs2/Xs3 - the sound quality is improved, sure, but not in alignment with the cost increase…
Certainly new for old with Naim is fantastic but for most brands it isn’t a good deal…
some stuff, like my Burson Conductor V2+ doesn’t have a modern equivalent I’d truly want… (not a ‘fan’ of “fans” in my hifi), and I can only imagine some parts are harder still to find ‘equivalent’ replacement to (a Sansui AU919 is an incredible piece of technology, whose equal is rare to find, and whilst may be ‘affordable’ I doubt anyone would have the foresight to know how much they’d need to insure their hifi for…).
Our hobbies are getting hard to replace…
Heck a Fuji x100v camera is worth more second hand than they were new.
Ditto for those wonderful Oppo bluray players. last gen 4K Oppos easily net double what they cost new.
Ask questions and get answers IN WRITING!
well wishes’ with~
Would agree, having not made a claim for decades when we were burgled over 10 years ago, the hassle and payout in no way matched premiums paid.
Despite extremely thorough records/invoices for virtually everything expensive (computer items, DSLRs, lenses) claimed apart from CDs/DVDs the loss adjusters were simply cynical and unpleasant and there is no way I would claim again without instructing someone to do the ‘counter loss adjusting’ and handling the claim on my behalf.
JL put our “full fat” home & contents up by two hundred this year (somewhere around +30%). So we’ve switched to Aviva.
It’s this aspect of the industry that I perhaps find most distasteful. They force you to continually negotiate for fair premiums. Switching providers (or at least threatening to) seems to be obligatory unless you’re prepared for premiums to increase at a rate totally disconnected from either general inflation or risk. They ratchet up premiums by unconscionable amounts until you cry “enough!”.
that seems to be the way. The counter argument from the insurers might be that they generously gave us a “joining discount” for the first year, and that subsequent years are just “the going rate”………….
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Depends on your perspective, I guess. I’d much rather a much more transparent and consistent pricing system. But I guess they run their numbers on customer aquisition Vs. customer retention costs, and act to maximize their profits.
@Alley_Cat i’m not sure how much help getting someone to do the ‘counter loss adjusting’ helps. i appointed a specialist and ‘highly regarded’ firm of loss assesors to handle my claim (with hiscox) on my gp’s advice.
the result was that the claim dragged on for five and a half years -i found it impossible to find out what was happening over that time - endless wrangling over the restoration and storage costs of the company they sub-contracted this too. in the end the loss assesors reached a compromise with the loss-adjuster on a take-it-or=leave-it ‘global settlement’ payment i would receive with no explanation of the basis on which it was calculated and refused to do anything further (they wanted their %)
admitedly it was a very large claim (>£400k) plus whatever the restoration company charged. but five and a half years seemed impossibly long - so i would give very careful thought before signing a contract with a company to handle the claim.
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I worked as an accountant inside a major loss team (over £100k claims) for 8 months back in 2008/2009 before setting up my own business. We also had a fire claim in our house in 2010 and dealing with that was quite painful- there is no compensation for the time taken to work out what your entire stock of dry food stuffs will cost to replace via Sainsbury’s website
A range of loss adjusters is available - from downright nasty to very pleasant. I worked with and against quite a few lost adjusters. How much time they have depends on what kind of snowstorm of business they are travelling through. There were some huge floods in 2007 that generated vast amounts of work for me and colleagues and the pressures to settle were huge with lots of attempted cheating in claims that could be difficult to counter
This shouldn’t be a one sided story as plenty of insureds lie and exaggerate in their claims - so even if you are not there is always that possibility in the adjuster’s mind. There is huge anecdotal evidence that insurers are seen as “fair game” and the adjusters have very difficult jobs. Which isn’t to say some of them aren’t a nightmare
Loss assessors were seen as being cowboys (I certainly saw some really dodgy behaviour)
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Good points, perhaps a loss assessor isn’t such a great idea, mine was a far more modest claim, I think I concluded at the time that it would have been less stressful to have had someone deal with the hassle on my behalf even if there was a fee of some kind involved.
That’s a balanced take on it. Perhaps it was a one off bad experience, but I really didn’t like the attitude of those investigating the claim, and it made me quite angry with an insurance company I’d been a customer of for years.
On the flipside I probably need to remember the excellent support we’ve had from our motor insurers over the years.
About 3 years ago had a substantial claim after water damage. This included room renovation and also replacement of hifi speakers etc. I was with HisCox. The claims process and the subsequent payout was top notch, I couldn’t fault them on anything.
Apart from a mortgage, insurance is perhaps the most complex issue any of us have to deal with.
With a background in finance, I can well understand the point Tim makes.
In essence false claims or even fraud is easy to perpetrate - far less easy to ascertain or investigate, at least on first review. Various benchmarks will be used by the insurers and their assessors.
Various issues have been touch on, in this thread. Currently discussing specific issues for annual renewal, some in part as a result of this thread, so thanks to the op. I deal with mutual directly through one of its branches.
Legal expense cover is one of the cheapest to obtain, one that can address unexpected events, as at least one esteemed member of the forum can attest, maybe has done so already in this thread.
Excess is an interesting one, iiuc, there is a sweet spot, increasing excess beyond that, doesn’t achieve much premium reduction.
Buildings is fairly straight forward - there are on line calculators, although anyone with a mortgage, has an extra duty, periodically either checking or have a surveyor opinion on rebuild cost. Apparently on renewal I have been asked to agree a survey - yet to establish style and who will do so, but I raise no objection, although have asked who pays!
Contents is the one that is the real quirk imho. First new for old, is establishing a benchmark replacement for all the contents.
One thing which I don’t think has been covered in the thread is that the majority of policies will not permit what I might term, cherry picking of contents cover. If it is part of the contents of a property, then it is expected to be covered. A pair of speakers incidentally, is a single unit, not two boxes; at least I already have that response ahead of renewal.
If contents includes items that as a policyholder, there is no intention to cover or replace, then that can contribute to under insurance and everything in a claim is scaled down.
Short answer it seems, if you don’t want to cover it, get rid of it !! A prompt for decluttering!
The old sofa, thread bare and long unused in the spare room, but which would cost a significant amount to match / replace - remembering new for old, for example, is a case in point. Ditto anything else, like old tv et al. The one exception might be, the necessity or otherwise of valuables, like jewellery and watches, particularly if a policyholder elects not to cover outside of the house, ymmv.
Interestingly, iiuc, carpets which I considered were “buildings” do need to be calculated within contents. I understood anything that is not generally removed when moving, was buildings, but carpets are contents. Worth checking a policy.
At the mo, awaiting an answer on contents re the black boxes. I am hoping simple total as a subset of contents will be acknowledged by underwriters as being realistic.
Insurance is expensive - until the day when the unexpected does happen. Circumstances will be substantial different, for some theft will be a higher risk; in other situations fire risk may have a higher profile. Insurance is very much a case of “caveat emptor”.
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Our fire claim was just a year after I finished working for a loss adjuster and the adjuster we had wasn’t particularly bad, but it was a really unpleasant experience. I completely understand that your experience could be hideous and am not trying to minimise that. But there was a flavour on the thread of whinging at how awful all insurance companies are which I didn’t feel was properly representative of reality
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