Recreational Insurance Tips
Often, we look at how inexpensively we can obtain insurance, without thinking about what we are sacrificing for the lower cost. This often leads to individuals insuring their golf cart, boat, or camper on their home or auto policy.
With Summer right around the corner, here are a few reasons you should have policies specifically for your recreational products.
- Coverage
There are often limitations to coverage options when adding a recreational product to a home or auto policy.
- Liability: Most home insurance policies will only provide liability coverage when the golf cart is on your property or on a golf course. If you drive your golf cart around your community, you may not have liability coverage in the event something happens. The same is true for off-road vehicles and dirt bikes.
- Claim Settlement: In the event of a loss, many home or auto policies will have limitations on the claims settlement value, cause of loss, or additional coverages. An example of additional coverages could be towing, loss of use, or additional equipment.
- Impact to Home / Auto Policy
We have all felt the impact of inflation, and insurance companies are not immune to this. If a recreational product is added to a home or auto policy, it could impact your home or auto policy in the following ways.
- Rate Increase: Due to the claim being filed against the home or auto policy, the carrier could remove a claims-free discount or add a claims surcharge which will impact the premium of the home and auto policy instead of only impacting the recreational product. This could cost you significantly more in the long term.
- Policy Termination: With stricter underwriting, many insurance companies have reduced the amount of claims they will accept. This means at renewal; your policy could be non-renewed. Typically, your current insurance company will not non-renew your policy for one claim, but if you then have another claim because of weather it could result in the policy being non-renewed,
- Difficulty Finding New Insurance: As mentioned above, many insurance companies are implementing stricter underwriting requirements. This may look different by the company, but many are only accepting one weather-related claim.
Insurance is not a one-size-fits-all all. Think about insuring your recreational property as fitting a round peg into a square hole. Will the peg fit, yes, but there will be gaps in the corner. In insurance, gaps should be avoided because they lead to higher costs for you, potentially denied claims and a poor experience.
There is good news, you can avoid these gaps. Contact me for a free, non-committal review of your policy or simply to ask a question. I own an independent insurance agency and have over a decade of experience assisting with and educating individuals about insurance.