Home Insurance
Protect Your Home with Insurance by Simply
Home is where the heart is. It’s where we escape to at the end of a long, hard day, and it’s where we bring up our families. In short, home is everything. With that in mind, it’s not surprising that we all want to protect our homes, as well as their contents and any valuable possessions, but with so many different insurance companies and options out there, it’s hard to know what you need and to what level. Fortunately, Insurance by Simply and our team of specialist brokers are here to help you protect what is yours.
Specialist Home Insurance
As well as standard home insurance, we also offer the following specialist home insurance.
Please Contact Us if you have any enquiries about business insurance.
Do I Need Home Insurance?
As a general rule, we’d always advise obtaining home insurance, however, this need is amplified if you’re a homeowner. Many mortgage lenders require you to have a basic building insurance policy from completion for the reinstatement value of the building, not for the purchase price. Here at Insurance by Simply we can provide piece of mind and help you protect your home and/or contents in a matter of minutes.
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What’s the Difference Between Contents and Building Insurance?
When we talk about home insurance, we can be referring to one of three things: contents insurance, building insurance and combined insurance.
Contents insurance
A policy is typically one which insures the items within your home against theft, water and fire damage. Your television, clothing and jewellery would all be examples of items covered by contents insurance. You can apply for varying levels of contents insurance depending on the value of items within your home; a house full of state-of-the-art electronic items, for example, will lead to a more expensive contents insurance premium than one without.
Building insurance
A building insurance policy protects the building itself, rather than the items housed within it. Should your building suffer structural damage of any kind, a building insurance policy will cover repairing or rebuilding.
Combined insurance
A policy in which both contents insurance and building insurance are combined into one. Combined policies usually provide the best value for money, and are often the best policies for people who own their home outright, as opposed to renting, for instance.
What Does Home Insurance Cover?
Home insurance is there to protect you, your family and your home when you most need it. If you’ve fallen foul of flooding or a fire, then your home insurance cover will help you get back on your feet. Home insurance will typically cover: burst pipes and escape of water; subsidence and heave; vandalism; burglary; fire, flood and storm damage.
It’s important to note that standard home insurance doesn’t cover normal ‘wear and tear’. This means that any pre-existing damage made worse by a severe storm, for instance, wouldn’t then be covered by the insurance policy, as it was already damaged beforehand. Similarly, home insurance won’t typically cover damage caused by pets on the property or damage caused as a result of a lack of maintenance.
How to Determine the Level of Home Insurance You Need
Determining Building Insurance
To determine the amount of building insurance you need, you need to take into account several factors, including:
A property’s age. Older properties often have higher rebuild costs than newbuilds. That’s because they might’ve used harder-to-procure materials and non-standardised designs/plans.
Homes with a non-standard construction. Properties built using non-standard construction, thatched cottages, for instance, tend to cost more to rebuild than those built using standard construction methods.
The easiest way to calculate your home’s rebuild value is to use the ABI’s simple rebuild value calculator, which can be found here. Another way to calculate your rebuild value is to go off a recent mortgage valuation, as this will give you a pretty accurate indication as to what your property’s value is. This, however, is more likely to take into account other external market factors, as opposed to just valuing the build itself.
Determining Contents Insurance
To determine the level of contents insurance you require, the easiest thing to do is go around your home and create an inventory of all your possessions, valuable or otherwise. Try to be as thorough and accurate as possible, as you don’t want to under-cover your contents (or over-insure them, for that matter).
Look online to get up-to-date values for items which might have decreased in value since their time of purchase; electronics, for example. With that in mind, it’s also worth regularly updating your contents insurance (we’d recommend annually) to ensure you’re getting the best, most accurate deal possible.
Why Might an Individual Need a Specialist Broker?
Not everybody will be able to apply for a standard home insurance policy. A specialist broker will help you determine several key factors, including whether you instead need non-standard home insurance or home insurance for people with bad credit.
Without a specialist broker, you can waste a lot of both time and effort. With so much conflicting information out there, it’s easy to get confused and lost. With a specialist broker, however, you’re guaranteed to get the quote that’s most appropriate for you.
We Want to Help However We Can
Here at Insurance by Simply our mission is to make your life as easy as possible, and it’s as simple as that. Our team of specialist insurance brokers have a wealth of experience between them and will always go the extra mile to help you get the best quote on your insurance, possible.
We’ll help you create a tailored, personalised quote whether you’re after commercial or domestic insurance; and because we’re independent brokers, we can offer both policies from large, general insurers, as well as more specialised insurance companies.