In addition to coverage for the home, home insurance policies come with all types of extra protections. Coverage for grave markers, credit card fraudulent charges, and loss assessment fees are just a few examples. In this article, we’re going to take a closer look at a free coverage option called scheduling personal property.
What Does it Mean to Schedule Personal Property?
Scheduling personal property means to specifically list items you own on your
home insurance policy. As you are probably well aware, most home insurance policies come with personal property coverage. For example, if your home is insured for $200,000, then you probably have about $120,000 in personal property coverage. Although you have this coverage, there are definitely certain benefits to scheduling personal property.
Benefit #1: Pay No Deductible. When you schedule personal property, you are exempt from paying your deductible to get scheduled items replaced. This benefit can really come in handy in small claims situations.
Benefit #2: Get full value for items. If you own nice jewelry, bullions, coins, antiques, or other expensive items, scheduling these items will help ensure you get full value for them. For example, if a small fire erupts in your home that is contained to just your bathroom, you can get all scheduled jewelry replaced at full value. If you hadn’t scheduled the jewelry, it might be difficult to get full value for all your lost jewelry.
Benefit #3: Mysterious disappearance is covered. One of the best parts of scheduling personal property is the fact that your items will be covered for mysterious disappearance. If you misplace or lose your scheduled items, they will be replaced no questions asked!
What Does it Take to Schedule Property?
Every
home insurance company is different, but most companies require a bill of sale or recent appraisal to schedule property. It costs a little extra money to schedule items on your policy, so most people only schedule items that are very expensive or have a sentimental value. Theoretically, you
could schedule each and every article of clothing you own (if you recently bought them or had them appraised), but it really wouldn’t make any sense to do this because 1) the cost of scheduling everything you own would far surpass the cost of your insurance policy, and 2) if you lose your clothes, it would probably just be easier to take the lump sum of personal property money you receive from the insurance company to buy new clothes.
Before you start to schedule property, talk to your current or prospective company to verify all the facts contained in this article. Most companies honor all benefits listed above; however, no company is required to offer all the aforementioned benefits and thus it is important to confirm the details with your current company.
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