Homeowners Insurance And Home Renovating
Home insurance contracts are long, boring and definitely not meant to be easy to read. So a lot of people don’t go over them in detail. If you’re one of them and are planning to renovate your home, you might be in for a shock. Read this article to find out what to do about home insurance while you remodel your home.
Your home is probably not insured while you are renovating. Yep, it’s in the fine print. Insurers dont’ care about providing coverage for houses that are being renovated. It’s easy to see why. The wrong wall gets demolished. A fire starts in a bedroom. The roof was taken apart, the house badly covered, a thunderstorm comes by to say, Hello, house without a roof. You definitely don’t want to find out your home was not insured after one of those things happens, do you?
So, here are five things you can do to to make sure you have coverage for your home while you’re renovating it. Do them before anyone touches your house. Don’t be like some of the people I know who starts renovations then goes to their insurance agent to find out if they’re insured. In their case, nothing bad happened the 3 days they weren’t covered. But that was luck. You don’t want to rely on luck.
1. Call your agent and make sure you have the right coverage for remodeling.
2. Make sure your general contractor has general liability insurance and wokers’ compensation insurance. You need them to have both because things can go wrong with your home, with someone working on your home or with someone who enters your home while it’s being remodeled. And you want to be covered for all the above.
3. If your current home insurance doesn’t cover renovations, buy builders risk insurance.
3 a. Make sure your general contractor is named as an additional insured.
3.b Double-check that you’re covered for the value of your home after it’s renovated.
4. Get yourself named as an additional insured on your general contractor’s general liability insurance policy. It’s so much safer this way.
Most general contractors pay their premiums on time. But not all. Make sure their policy is paid on time even if that means you’re the one who buys builder’s risk policy.
5. Since you’re renovating your house, odds are it will be worth more when you’re done renovating than it was when you began. So, update your current home insurance. (Not quite related, but if you don’t renovate, if the value of your home hasn’t increased but decreased, you should adjust your insurance too. You are paying more in premiums to insure a $450,000 home than a $320,000, and in some neighborhoods, value drops like that did happen.)
To conclude, you should always check with your insurer before you start remodeling your house. You should check that you have proper home insurance once a year.
Are you scouring the internet for “Chicago homeowners insurance?” Make sure your very expensive asset has proper coverage by getting your Chicago homeowners insurance from an independent Chicago insurance agency. They have access to tons of plans. They’ll find you the one that fits your needs perfectly.
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