2y ago

Contents insurance up 33% for us. Is this common?

We've got contents insurance with AA and from next year we'll be paying 33% more. We have had 2 claims for a different policy this year, one at fault, one not, and they said it wouldn't impact our premiums. Is this common for everyone? I understand it goes up because of all the floods, but 33% is very significant.

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Not sure sorry.
But it does raise the question about at which point is a revolving credit a better deal then contents insurance?
Assume that you have $100k of contents; you pay X to insure it; is X more or less than the 8.39%pa on $100k? How likely are you to loose all $100k of the contents?
e.g. if you say knock your TV off the wall, a new 50" TV is say $2500; the cost of $2500 over 5 years is $57/month. How much are you paying on your contents?
This is not good advice; if you break stuff often, or you can't put your "insurance" money into a savings account.
- Yeah valid point. We're mainly covering it in case of a total loss, ie our house burns down.
  For the rest we don't have expensive items, we have a $600 Warehouse Veon TV for example. Probably most expensive in our contents is my ebike with new price $1450
  
  That's really the only reason to have contents insurance. I don't have the contents insurance to hand.
  House insurance is a no-brainer; I just checked mine and we pay ~0.25% of the value of the house to insure it.
- One thing often overlooked is that your contents insurance is also where your liability insurance lies. So it's not just for your stuff, but also in case one of your trees falls on the neighbour's Lamborghini, or you're otherwise responsible for property damage of someone else's stuff.
  Contents insurance is important. If you're trying to self-insure then just put your excess high and the contents insured value low.
  
  Good point
At some point, I need to go through the various insurances we have and check we are getting good value for money, between house, contents, and cars, it's a lot.
- Yeah I do that regularly and every time AA comes out cheapest, or slightly more expensive. We've had multiple claims via the and so far so good. Just did a quote with AMI and they are twice the price of AA. Guess we'll just have to suck it up.
  
  We've always found the bank insurance to be cheapest. For a long time we had third party only for cars (only last year did we get our first car worth more than a few grand) and we could get third party for about $120 a year through the bank (no fire/theft/windows). We couldn't get anything near that anywhere else.
Hmm ours went up about 15% during the year, but not 30%. We aren't in a flood zone, though (our neighbours house would have water at the ceiling before water was at our floor).
As I've mentioned before, we keep all our excesses as high as we can so if they are accounting for more small claims then that might not affect us so much.
- Yeah think it makes sense with big ticket items like houses and contents. With vehicles, we've got relatively cheap cars and then it's nice to have lower excess. Financially it may not be the best option, but peace of mind knowing that any scratch costs max 500 is nice too.
  
  We are lucky to be in a position that the higher excesses (normally $1k-2k from memory) won't cause us financial stress. Even if lots of things go bad at once, it will hurt but won't be damaging long term, just make it take longer to pay off the mortgage.
  I guess I just hate paperwork more than I want the coverage, claiming on insurance is not something I want to do, so I put excesses higher to avoid it. Peace of mind for me is knowing I don't have to spend several days arguing with the insurance company over $500 😆. We sometimes spend that much at the supermarket! (Though having a few of those prompted me to buy a lot more from the weekend markets, so it hasn't actually happened for a while).

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