1. Insuring Your Home's Structure
2. Insuring Your Personal Property
3. Liability Insurance
4. Guest Medical Insurance
5. Flood Insurance*

Protecting Your Home & Personal Property with Insurance

At your home, you rely on having a safe, comfortable place to live. When you purchase a home insurance policy, it should contain a description of your home's structure and a list of excluded events that may not included. It's important to ensure you understand what in included in your coverage and any additional options you may want to consider.

Your Residence Type Matters

Structures vary so widely that a different policy is usually required for each type of home. For instance...

• A Condo policy typically covers interior structures like wallboard and lighting fixtures. Depending on your state, your association by-laws, and insurer, external walls may not be covered.
• Within a Home insurance policy, usually a home's entire structure is covered along with sheds and detached garages.
• For Manufactured Homes, the entire structure is usually covered, while sheds and garages may require an optional policy.
• A Renters insurance policy typically has no physical structure coverage at all, but it often provides essential liability and contents coverage.

Most Unfortunate Events are Covered

Most insurance companies offer coverage for the same events that may damage the structure of your home, including fire, smoke, lightning, wind, hail, frozen plumbing, theft, explosion, vandalism, the weight of ice and snow, and a few others.

Excluded Events are Named in the Policy

Typically, floods and earthquakes are excluded from basic policies, but in some areas, you may be able to get supplemental insurance policies for those situations. A few other conditions most companies specifically exclude are mold, fungus, wet rot, dry rot and bacteria.

How to Choose Personal Property Coverage

Do you know how much your belongings are worth? The figure is often much more than our customers initially think. Taking the time to assess what you own, and to understand how your coverage works, can help you make sure everything you value is adequately covered.

Start by walking around your home and look for items that you spent a lot of money on, or that have appreciated in value since you got them. Having a record of those items (pictures, documents, etc.) - especially those most important to you either financially or personally, is very important in working to ensure they are protected properly.

Actual Cash Value vs. Replacement Cost

Actual Cash Value and Replacement Cost coverage options refer to different ways your belongings may be replaced in the event of a covered loss. Many of your belongings will decrease in value over time, so it's important to consider this when you purchase coverage for protecting your personal property.

Actual Cash Value Coverage

Your personal property is typically covered for what you might expect to get if you sold it at fair market value - possibly at a garage sale, online auction site or other sales event - as replacement cost minus depreciation.
This coverage option may allow for the insured item to be replaced with a used item but not always a new one. Premiums for Actual Cash Value insurance coverage though generally cost less than those for the Replacement Cost coverage option.

Replacement Cost Coverage

With Replacement Cost coverage, your insured personal property items are usually covered for what it costs to buy them again at the time of the claim as new, although premiums for this type of insurance are typically higher than the Actual Cash Value insurance coverage option.

Item Categories and Limits

Insurance companies often group certain kinds of things into categories - and sometimes assign maximum amounts that can be paid to replace all of the items or even single items in the category. Your total property limit may give you the impression you have plenty of coverage, but you may find that your category limit on computers isn't nearly enough to replace all of the computers in your home.

A common item in a category covered by your policy, such as a watch, may be worth $25 or $5,000. Because this category can vary so greatly in value, your policy may set a "per item limit."

For example: There may be a $1,000 limit per piece of jewelry and a $2,500 limit for all jewelry as a group. If you own a couple of inexpensive watches, you're in great shape. If you own a watch that has appraised for $10,000, you have an option to cover that specific watch at a higher amount.

If your valuables exceed per item limits, you may want to ask your agent about a Scheduled Personal Property coverage option to better protect more valuable items.

Insuring Groups of Valuable Items

You can use an Optional Coverage to raise the group limit on a category covered by your policy, such as computers or you can use it to insure an entire category of items that are not covered by your policy because they are less commonly owned.

To make sure your belongings are adequately covered, you'll want to go over your policy's category and item limits with your agent. Find an agent now. Learn about other types of residential insurance coverage How are you covered in the event of a lawsuit? Allstate's liability insurance overview can tell you. How will you help pay for your guest's medical bills in the event of an accident? Learn more about guest medical coverage. How are you protected against flood damage? Read about flood insurance.

Insuring Groups of Valuable Items

You can often use an Optional Coverage to raise the group limit on a category covered by your policy, such as computers or you can use it to insure an entire category of items that are not covered by your policy because they are less commonly owned.

Keep Your Family - and Your Assets - Safe
Liability Insurance helps protect you against the financial uncertainty arising from injury (or property damage) that you or your family may cause to other people. It typically even covers injuries whether they happen on or away from your property.

What Does Liability Insurance Cover?

In the event that you or anyone in your household is accused of accidentally causing injury or damage to property, your insurance coverage can help by providing for legal defense fees and, in the event of a settlement or judgment, can pay damages (up to your policy limit).

Imagine if you didn't have liability insurance. Any of your following assets could be at stake:

• Retirement accounts (IRA, 401(k), pension plans)
• Non-retirement investments (stocks, bonds, mutual funds)
• Liquid assets (checking, savings, CDs, money market accounts)
• Personal property (actual value of all your possessions if you sold them: cars, boats, jewelry, furniture, etc.)
• Home and other real estate equity

Protect Yourself - and Your Guests - From an Accident Occurring at Your Home

Guest medical coverage, included in most residential insurance policies, provides protection for your guests, should they be injured in or around your home accidentally. Typically, policyholders with guest medical coverage can feel confident in their ability to help pay for reasonable and necessary medical expenses (up to policy limits) caused by accidents at your home that are not covered by liability protection.

What Types of Expenses May Be Included in Guest Medical Coverage?

Usually, reasonable medical expenses incurred to resolve a medical emergency (that happened in your home or on your property) and reimbursed include such items as:

• Medical
• Surgical
• X-ray
• Dental
• Ambulance
• Hospital
• And much more

Rising Waters Require Special Coverage

Floods and flash floods can occur anytime, anywhere, in all 50 states on coasts, in the mountains, along rivers and in the middle of the desert. In fact, roughly 25% of all flood insurance claims come from areas not considered high risk.

How Can You Protect Against Flood Damage?

The Federal Government runs a National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which is why most home and property insurance typically doesn't cover flooding.

The government draws a Flood Hazard Boundary Map that divides the country into flood zone risk areas, and their Flood Insurance Rate Map sets the coverage and premiums for those areas.

You can enter your address at www.floodsmart.gov to find out your risk

How Can You Protect Against "Non-Flood" Water Damage?

You may need to consider additional water backup insurance. Neither the NFIP, nor your base homeowner's policy, will typically cover water thatbacks up through sewers or drains or overflows from a sump pump. .