Tips to Get A Great Homeowner’s Insurance Policy
Just because you have homeowner’s insurance doesn’t mean your valuables are adequately protected. While most of your possessions are probably covered just fine by your policy, valuables such as jewelry, fine art, rare coins, and even antique silverware are covered differently.
For valuables such as these, most homeowner policies place a limit of $1,000 to $2,500 for each category of item. That means, for example, that all of your jewelry combined – not each item – would only be covered up to the $1,000 to $2,500 total limit. If you have antiques or heirlooms you can quickly see how such coverage would be woefully inadequate.
To properly cover valuables you will first have to decide which items you want covered. Then take those items to a professional appraiser who will put a price tag on each item. You will then need to contact your insurance company to get a rider placed to include each item on your policy. This usually costs around $1 per month for every $100 in coverage, although it varies by insurer.
While it won’t necessarily be cheap to insure all your valuables, you will sleep better at night knowing you will be properly compensated if anything ever happens to them.
Selling Life Insurance Policies on Your Own Life Becomes More Popular
Many seniors are now selling their life insurance policies to raise cash, according to a recent issue of Kiplinger’s. In 2006, a whopping $6.1 billion in life insurance policies with death benefits changed hands.
Here’s how it works: when you sell your policy to a stranger, that person pays you a cash sum and continues to pay the premiums on the policy to keep it current. Here’s where it gets weird: the stranger to whom you sold your policy only profits when you die.
These transactions are called life settlements and they are becoming more common. Huge banks like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs invest in packages of life settlements because the return is not correlated with the stock market. So as an investor, life settlements can be a great way to diversity and hedge your stock market exposure.
Investors in life settlement policies prefer people over 65 who are insured for at least $500,000 or more. So would you sell your life insurance policy to a stranger?