How to Save Money on Your Home Insurance

Your home is likely to be the largest financial commitment you’ll ever make in your life. Since it’s also likely to be your most valuable asset, it’s vital that you’re protected in the event that disaster strikes.

Like any other financial product, there are dozens of insurance companies offering a vast array of insurance policies for buildings and contents insurance for your home. Prices can differ greatly, so here are some tips on how to minimise the cost of insuring your home and everything within it.

Buildings and Contents:The Two Types of Home Insurance

Buildings insurance only protects the actual building structure—not your belongings. Renters don't need to buy buildings insurance, but property owners might. Although buildings insurance is not strictly required from a legal point of view, most lenders will require you to have buildings insurance in place as a condition of giving you a mortgage loan. Having buildings insurance protects your lender and you against the cost of repairing or rebuilding your home if it ever gets damaged.

Both renters and owners need to think about whether you need contents insurance to protect your worldly possessions, too. Contents insurance will cover the cost of repairing or replacing your possessions in the event of a fire, flood or burglary.

1. Compare the Market

That’s not a plug for the meerkats (cute though they are), but it means you should shop around and get a range of quotes when you’re looking for a home insurance policy.

And, yes, the comparison sites like our partner QuoteZone are a great place to start looking. Be careful, though—the comparison sites don’t always include all the major insurers. Direct Line, for example, doesn’t appear on them, so consider getting separate quotes from them.

Before you start shopping around and comparing quotes, it’s important to work out exactly what kind of cover you’re looking for, and then only consider policies that offer everything you need. While none of us has a crystal ball, it can cost you more in the long term if you buy a cheap policy that doesn’t offer the protection you need, only to find out later that you’re forced to repair some damage or replace a loss out of your own pocket.

2. Consider a combined buildings and contents policy

While it’s possible to take out separate policies for buildings and contents insurance, you can also buy a combined home insurance policy. This can often work out cheaper than buying them separately, since most insurers will offer a discount for buying both policies with them.

There’s no guarantee, though, so it’s still worth comparing individual buildings and contents policies with different insurers to see which works out cheaper.

3. Don’t take out insurance for things you don’t need

There are always extra features available for home insurance. Needless to say, all the additional bells and whistles will cost you more money. They include:

There are policies that include some of these benefits as standard, but others charge you to add them or to increase the maximum amount insured. Find out what is included as standard, and only add the things you really need.

4. Pay your premium annually, not monthly

You can usually choose to pay for your home insurance either in monthly installments or in a single upfront annual payment.

It will almost always be cheaper to make a single annual payment if you can afford it, since most insurers will add interest to your monthly payments, making it up to 10% more expensive, or more.

5. Don’t over insure

You obviously need to make sure that you have enough insurance cover for your buildings and contents, but it makes no sense to have too much cover, since you’ll end up paying more than you need to. How much cover do you need?

Then, when you’re shopping around for policies, try to match the cover as closely as possible to these amounts. Some insurers will even let you set the cover level to the exact values you need.

6. Increase the excess

The insurance "excess" is the amount you have to pay towards any claim you make. So if you make a claim for £5,000 and your excess is £500, your insurance company will only pay a maximum of £4,500. Most insurers will let you increase the excess on your policy in exchange for a cheaper premium. This makes sense, since the amount they ever have to pay out for a claim will be less, the more you contribute through the excess.

Take care with this, though: your total costs could be more if you do ever need to make a claim, so always make sure the excess you choose is an amount you could afford to lose (or pay yourself) if you ever make a claim.

7. Make your home as secure a possible

Increasing home security reduces the chance of a break-in, which can also mean cheaper home insurance. Some ways to do this include:

Keeping your home secure will also reduce the likelihood of you ever needing to make a claim, which will help you to…

8. Build up your no claims bonus

For every year you hold a home insurance policy and don’t make a claim, you earn a no claims bonus. It works just like the no claims bonus on your car or motorbike insurance.

The more years you can go without claiming, the lower your home insurance will cost, so it really does pay to make sure your home is protected against damage and theft.

Home insurance: the final word

Insurance is an unusual product, in that it’s something we almost all buy in one form or another (and usually several) but hope we'll never need. Shop around to get the best possible deal, and shop around again every year when it’s time to renew. Your current insurer will often give you a discount on your premium if you tell them you’re found a cheaper offer and you’re considering moving. Don’t buy more insurance than you need, and try to reduce your chances of ever needing to make a claim. The longer you can build up your no claims bonus, the less you’ll pay.