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What to Consider When Renewing Your Homeowners Insurance

Before you hit ‘auto renew,’ take the time to review!

Most homeowners are happy securing a homeowners insurance policy, putting it on auto-renewal, and forgetting about it. Unfortunately, this can be a costly mistake to make. You know that your life isn’t the same as it was a year ago. In fact, it may be significantly different. With your changing lifestyle and home, your policy will need to be updated, too.

Before you choose to auto renew your policy, check out these issues to consider.

Belongings

Have you sold or bought significant items in the past 12 months? Perhaps you inherited family heirlooms, bought a new surround sound stereo, or sold your antique grandfather clock. Either way, if your home inventory has changed, your home inventory in your policy should be updated. If it’s not updated and you’ve purchased items of high value, you may be leaving them exposed to damage and theft. For valuable items, you may need to add a separate rider onto your policy to fully help protect your belongings.

Structure

Anything that increases (or decreases) the value of your home will affect your insurance. If you remodel the kitchen and bath, or finish the basement, you’ll increase the rebuild value of your home. For this, your policy will need to be adjusted so that it covers 100 percent of your home, rather than 75 percent. After all, if your new kitchen burned down, you wouldn’t want your policy to only rebuild your old kitchen!

Lifestyle

Did you add in a pool or adopt a dog? You may not think to call your insurer when one of these events happen, but it’s important that you do! Take the time now to review your policy. In this case, you’ll have a higher risk of liability, and you may need to consider adding a personal umbrella policy to safeguard your finances.

Take the time review your insurance policy. When you have questions or concerns, visit us at Unisource Insurance Associates to secure your much-needed homeowners insuranceContact us today to get started in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin.