Reevaluating your Insurance at Home

If you’ve been spending more time at home recently you should be aware of the fact that you are more likely to suffer an accident or injury at home over any other location. More than 50 percent of all accidents involving injury occur inside your home.

This is partly due to the fact that we spend so much of our time at home – a large portion of your every day life will be spent at your apartment or house. This increases the risk of experiencing an accident in a domestic setting simply because it is where you will most often find yourself located. But its not just your person that is at risk, your home contains your belongings – many of which could be expensive, or hold sentimental value that is impossible to replace.

With so much that can go wrong inside a seemingly safe space, and with many of us spending significantly more time at home these days, there is no time like the present to reevaluate you Hong Kong insurance coverage with a view to protecting yourself at home.

Home Contents Insurance

The obviously place to start when talking about Home Insurance is with Home Contents coverage.

Home Contents insurance is pretty self-explanatory; this type of insurance is designed to protect the stuff in your home. However, when it comes to how the insurance is able to protect your possessions you have an extremely wide range of choice. From basic policies that offer a pre-determined overall maximum coverage limit and fairly restricted protection for individual items, through to bespoke collections policies that offer coverage up to tens of millions of dollars, it is possible to find the home contents insurance policy that best meets your specific needs.

One common and defining feature of many of the home contents insurance products available in Hong Kong is the existence of a Worldwide All Risks benefit. This means that, unless an exclusion is applied (like poor packaging prior to transport), your personal possessions will be covered against loss or damage no matter what happens. At least, that is the theory – in practice it is important that you thoroughly examine your home contents policy to ensure that you’re not getting hit with any unexpected exclusions.

Many Home Contents insurance plans will also cover fixtures and fittings that you, as a renter, may have added to the property. So if you installed a new high power showerhead which breaks during a period of Work-From-Home, if your home contents insurance offers fixture protection you would be able to get that fixed and claim the costs through insurance, rather than have to wait for the landlord to come and fix it (and deal with the covid precautions that would follow).

Fire Insurance in Hong Kong

If you own your home, or are a landlord with a rental property, it is highly likely that your mortgage company will have required you to obtain Fire Insurance at the time of purchase. However, with more people spending time at home, it may have been some time since you last looked at your fire insurance protection and now would be the right time to see if you need expanded coverage.

If you (or your renter) are at home for a long period of time, the items inside a home are going to be in use more than normal. This is going to put increased stress on them, and in a world that runs on electricity that is not a good thing. A toaster, kettle, or microwave are fairly innocuous items, but the older these things are the higher the chance that they could cause an electrical short (or radiation exposure in a worst-case microwave failure), which in turn could cause a fire.

This isn’t a likely scenario – but it is a possible one.

Being at home for extended periods of time comes with a higher chance of something going wrong. While “Fire Insurance” may be the term used to refer to this type of policy, one that protects the physical structure of a residence, “fire and allied perils” is the more accurate description. This is due to the fact that Fire insurance plans can, and often will, cover flood damage, land slip and subsidence losses, and many more affiliated (or allied) risks.

So, when a pipe bursts because you’ve been de-stressing by taking more showers, or running the dishwasher more consistently because you’ve been eating your feelings, a Fire and Allied Perils insurance policy can be a vital part of providing peace-of-mind.

Personal Accidents at Home

As we said previously, the major risk at home is that you personally suffer an accident or injury. Your stuff might be difficult to replace, but at the end of the day it is just stuff. Accidents at home can be serious, if not deadly.

From slipping on the shower floor and hitting your head, suffering a traumatic brain injury, through to tripping on some stairs and breaking your neck, there are many unacknowledged hazards of simply being at home. With more than half of all serious accidents in the developed world occurring in private residences, the risks you take every day in your home is not appreciated enough.

In the event that you do suffer a serious accident in your residence, Personal Accident insurance could be of welcome assistance.

Personal Accident Insurance provides a lump sum cash settlement to you in the event that you experience death, dismemberment, or disablement while the plan is active. Personal accident policies can be taken either on a standalone basis, or as part of a Life Insurance plan and often complement health insurance products in terms of the protection they afford the policyholder.

Home Insurance in Hong Kong

With all the time that we’ve spent at home over the last two years, and the time we are expecting to spend at home in the near future, having the proper coverage to protect against the full range of risks you are experiencing is important.

CCW Global’s expert Home Insurance brokers can help you to identify the gaps in your current home insurance coverage, and will work with you to compare and build the home insurance portfolio that best meets your specific needs.

To request a free, no-risk, no-obligation quote, simply complete the short form at the top of this page. Alternatively, you can learn more about CCW Global and our quotation process by Contacting Us today.