Posts Tagged ‘contents insurance’

Students – get money savvy or else!

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

While the people at Tescocompare.com are aware that there’s nothing like university for excitement and thrills, they acknowledge too that with freedom comes more responsibility!

According to the article “Students ensure your finances are first class” the frivolity of student life can lose its appeal when the bills start rolling in and you have to make all kinds of financial decisions without previous experience. In this article they offer a helping hand with down to earth basic advice for the new student through this life of financial independence.

The student loan is not a huge amount of money so you will need to keep a keen budget in order to leave enough money to go round. To sum up, in order to survive at uni, you will need to find out how to budget, learn to cook, know where the cheapest books are and where the discounts can be had in order to save money. Before leaving for university check out all that is on offer in terms of student discounts and wise up to how much money you will be living on and how far it will stretch. Get some contents insurance sorted for your belongings in case of burglary and the like (this will seem like a painful outgoing but will radically transform into an overwhelming relief!) Above all get some tips from those that know on the subject of budgeting. My nephew was lucky enough to have a Citizens Advice Bureau debt counsellor to help him through the difficult patches (even if he was too proud to ask her at the start!)

According to tescocompare.com not only will you be studying for a BA in say psychology, you will also be getting a BA in budgeting. Quick economics lesson! Everything costs something! Every time you need to eat, you will have to dip into your personal finances to make it happen. There is no one to help you now. You the student are on your own. Don’t worry, you will soon get used to the situation of standing on your own two feet! One thing that students learn very quickly (other than where the best ‘happy hours’ are) is the science of effective budgeting! By the time you leave uni you too will be a worthy shopper of bargains far and wide! Before too long, you too will be preparing a slap up meal for one for under two pounds utilising yesterday’s leftovers and a couple of sticks of spaghetti!

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Succumbing to the SWEET temptations of buying a home!

Friday, February 20th, 2009

In an effort to encourage homebuyers to come forward developers are offering sweeteners to get us motivated. You never knew home buying could be such fun!

According to the article “Frenzy of freebies to tempt homebuyers” you could be the proud owner of a home. All you have to do is to purchase a winning raffle ticket for fifty pounds and take part in a quiz. Polish up your general knowledge and you could have your own home!

Homes are becoming increasingly difficult to sell thanks to the recession with an estimate of 20,000 unsold homes across the nation. This is why a whole host of incentives are being created to give the current sluggish home buying market a bit of a boost. The developers MIA are discovering that a well placed incentive scheme is just what is required to stand out from the crowd. Managing Director Rafik Patel claims you need to innovate in order to survive the struggles of the current house buying market. The company is offering up a £8.25 million apartment development for 200,000 subscriptions of raffle tickets at fifty pounds a time as well as some participation in an online quiz. Don’t worry if you don’t win an apartment in East London, your money will contribute towards a good cause, that of Great Ormond Street hospital.

Incentive schemes available elsewhere include that by Persimmon who are set to pay your utility bills, council tax, buildings insurance, contents insurance and mortgage payments for twelve months when you take on one of a selected range of houses. This is a package worth about twelve thousand five hundred pounds. Home buying has never been so thought provoking.

The more you look, the more of these incentive schemes you see as builders and sellers alike are pitching against one another to sell up in what appears a very stagnant marketplace. While the offering of incentives is not a completely alien idea, say the Home Builders’ Federation, it is becoming more commonplace with schemes becoming more inventive in an effort to stand out from the crowd. The federation went on to add these incentive schemes were once upon a time used to encourage customers to close the deal but nowadays, it is unusual to come across a plot without one as they are more commonly used in order to get customer traffic moving.

The development giant, Taylor Wimpey is currently offering discount vouchers of £17,500 or if you would prefer free carpets, furniture and removals. On a smaller level, a seller in Lancashire hopes to raise the money for his house via 14,000 tickets for entry into a Sudoku competition at £50 a time.

House buying has never been so strange!

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Everybody wants a doctor in the house?

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

A recent poll that launched Halifax’s new Landlord Insurance has revealed the preferred tenant to be a woman who is a medical professional earning an average of £25,000 and who is aged between 36 and 45 years.

According to the article “Medical professionals top the bill of best tenants” a thousand landlords in the UK were interviewed in this revealing survey and the results prove somewhat worrying for prospective tenants outside of the favoured demographics. The results exposed the fact that overwhelmingly (just under eighty per cent) women were preferred as tenants on the whole and that if you hail from London this would be definitely seen in your favour.

Landlords are not as greedy as they are reputed to be according to some rather shocking results. If a prospective tenant earning a modest salary competed with someone earning over seventy thousand pounds for a property, a third of the total sample claimed the more affluent of the two would not necessarily be favoured.

People under the age of twenty-five were not considered ideal tenants while someone with a medical background would be preferred above all other occupations (particularly HGV drivers, celebrities, traffic wardens and shop workers).

Although landlords are right to get the best tenant in order to protect their property, should the perfect tenant turn out to be the tenant from Hell, Landlord Insurance will provide something of a safety net. In all this, we mustn’t forget the tenant however. He/she needs protection too and unfortunately this is not covered under Landlord Insurance. To make you’re your belongings and valuables are safe as houses, ensure your contents insurance provides exactly what you need from it!

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Dining-in accidents – they will happen!

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

This credit crunch has a lot to answer for! All kinds of problems and situations are rearing their heads as people attempt to hold onto their pennies! Watch out for having dinner at home! According to the article “Furniture at risk as entertaining at home increases!” people are claiming on their contents insurance for damage to furniture brought about by entertaining at home!

Everybody seems to be swapping the luxury of eating out for dining in. Friends are telephoned with home dinner invitations instead of one to a favourite restaurant. While it is a nice trend and an almost lost art of entertaining is dusted down and brought out on show again, there is a down side according the insurance company Swinton.

More and more claims are being made on contents insurance for damage caused to furniture and possessions. People are overwhelmingly enjoying a generous helping of alcohol taken from within the comfort of their own homes! While drinks are cheaper at home and it saves on taxi fares, entertaining at home is costing our insurance companies.

Just over eighty per cent of Swinton customers enjoyed entertaining friends at home instead of meeting them out for a drink and/or a meal. Out of these customers, thirty six per cent had an unfortunate accident and incurred some kind of damage to their belongings as a result of hosting the entertainment at home! And people say it is cheaper to entertain at home!

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Students standing up to burglars at last!

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

What with the new university terms set to start, the article “Freshers’ week means rich pickings for burglars” couldn’t be better timed. It is about time students had some help protecting their belongings, they will certainly have their hands full in the weeks ahead.

Shockingly, one in three students will become a victim of the dreaded ubiquitous burglar, which is all the more reason for security to be upped and contents insurance to be in place. Burglars see students at rich pickings on account of their bountiful possessions. Let’s face it, students accumulate expensive gadgets like there’s no tomorrow!

Saga Insurance have a free ‘Student Survival’ guide book to help students help themselves as well as offering really handy contents packages. The most important feature it offers is that windows and doors in student digs are checked for security which is the main point of entry for thieves as well as other ways to drastically reduce the occurrence of burglary.

The people at Saga have, if you have a contents package with them, added on to your insurance package a student appendage offering up to £3,500 protection for your children’s valuable possessions. This will entitle you to cover when possessions are in transit as well as at the new students accommodation. What will definitely appeal is that downloaded music and items of a digital content are also protected.

Before you move in permanently to your new student accommodation, check out the security of the building looking out for security lights, locks and burglar alarms. Marking all belongings with a UV marker is highly recommended as well as lights on timer switches (to give the impression you are home) and getting your student possession insurance in place.

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Holiday home risk taking – is it really worth it?

Saturday, August 9th, 2008

The article “Brits leave personal goods unattended in holiday homes” highlights the fact that holiday home owners are leaving valuable belongings unattended at their own risk.

Our holiday homes are not secure! Containing collectively, over £6.3 billion worth of personal possessions and valuables, it comes as a surprise to learn that holiday home protection is not adequately provided for.

The company Zurich Private Clients are observing a pattern where their affluent clients are being targeted for burglary even when they are occupying their second homes. It seems a popular trick is to release gas into the air con system so that they can steal valuables without the victims resisting.

People with second homes are not paying attention to insurance. About one in ten have no contents insurance for their holiday home and eleven percent have claimed they have no idea if their insurance is adequate.

Holiday home owners, for some reason, seem to be a little cavalier about their security arrangements. Basic practices like fitting locks on the windows are being ignored. Don’t tell anyone, but 6% have admitted to no security at all. The message the insurance companies want to put out is that even though a holiday home is secondary their security protection should be afforded just as much attention as their first home.

They are left empty for the majority of the year, sometimes for months at a time. Two thirds of people with holiday homes claim to visit them no more often than every three months. Although offering out the holiday home to friends and relatives, many of these holiday-homers admit their homes quite often remain empty for at least a month at a time. When holiday homes in Britain have contents to the average value of £15,200, it comes as a big surprise that they have such a slap dash attitude to their belongings. Despite this however, when quizzed they claimed they were worried about the security of their holiday home, particularly of local crime and their empty house being targeted by criminals.

Never before has property been at a premium for the buyers of the UK holiday home market. Apparently, we can’t get enough! Even if we haven’t the time to enjoy our second properties for more than twice a year, we still can’t resist investing in them!

These holiday-homers – they just don’t seem to get enough! Around 18% of holiday home owners are actively seeking more properties and forty seven per cent of these are ready to purchase in 2008.

Countries that are the most popular with purchasers of holiday homes are France and Spain (24% and 26% respectively). Other destinations moving up the ranks include Cyprus and Bulgaria. Twenty five per cent of people who are hoping to buy a holiday home in the near future are thinking about purchasing somewhere in the United Kingdom. Half the holiday home buyers are hoping to find their dream home on the continent while twenty five per cent want to find somewhere outside of Europe.

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Big Brother IX – Insuring The Unpredictable

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

What with all the Big Brother 9 mayhem going on, at times you’d be forgiven for wondering how much the Big Brother house costs to insure. An article published recently in PR Web shines a little light on the matter.

This is one unpredictable house. You never know what’s going to go wrong. One thing you are sure of, that something WILL go wrong! Furniture often gets wrecked, accidents happen and tomfoolery is at its worst as the world sits back in its favourite armchair and watches the foolhardy shenanigans of the Big Brother housemates. To all intents and purposes the contents of the house are designer label or specially crafted for the year’s intake, so what would the creators have to pay out for house insurance. In the article, ‘Confused dot com’ provide some answers.

One positive point is that flooding is not a problem, despite all efforts by the raucous inmates. The location of the famed Big Brother house is beside the Elstree film studio water tank where Moby Dick was filmed. There is not likely to be any flooding, so no flood risk added to the insurance cover. Good start.

Smoking is not allowed in the Big Brother 9 house, so it’s a home insurance quote for a non-smoking household. In actuality, the local council defines the Big Brother house a place of work, in which case, if a contestant was to smoke indoors, the programme would have to fork out £2,500 each time it happens.

The security of the Big Brother house is not a problem. While many houses rely on a security alarm system, window locks and double locks galore, the BB house has 24 hour seven days a week security monitoring via CCTV as well as security guards and dogs.

Contents insurance is set at an amount much less than normal at £50,000. In the Big Brother house, there are no accumulated personal items although furniture and appliances are usually top notch expensive items.

To top it all off, Big Brother’s building is insured for £500,000 which is equal to the build value.

All in all, things could be a lot worse for the money people at Big Brother!

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Contents Insurance – It’s Easy To Be Underinsured

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

An interesting piece in yesterday’s Telegraph talking about how easy it is forget that the contents of our houses increases over time. They’re reporting that it’s not unusual for claims adjusters to reduce a claim by as much as 50% simply because the contents of the house were underinsured. They state that “Figures published by Abbey last year show that 257,000 of all home insurance policies, across both building and contents cover, were declined as a result of underinsurance.” I can’t believe that the claims were totally disallowed, the normal procedure is to reduce the claim by the percentage of under valuation. Thus if I take out that provides cover for £30,000 and the insurance assessor value the contents of the house at £60,000 then you should only expect to be paid half of the amount that you claim.

The article also points out that there is a wide difference in the blanket cover (i.e. the contents not individually valued and listed) offered by the leading insurance companies. Direct Line’s basic policy offers £15,000 of unspecified item cover whereas More Than has the limit set at £75,000. Once more it’s telling us that we should research all insurance cover before making a final choice. Product loyalty is often misplaced, one company could have the best value car insurance whereas their home insurance sucks…always take a few minutes to do some research. You’ll find a wide choice of insurers on the home insurance pages of the website.

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