Accidental damage insurance for renters

thinkmoney

Financial Guidance

Home insurance isn’t just for homeowners – your belongings still need protection even if you’re a tenant. It’s important to have insurance in case someone steals something of yours or a flood causes damage to your stuff.

If you’ve got tenants insurance to protect your belongings, you might consider getting renters accidental damage insurance. This means you could also claim if you broke anything by accident and you wanted a replacement. Let’s take a look at what accidental damage insurance for renters will cover and what you won’t need.

What to protect

It’s good to know that your possessions are insured if there’s a fire or a flood or if someone breaks in and steals something. Obviously, having insurance won’t make your loss any easier but it does mean you could make a claim and you won’t end up out of pocket. This is why you might think about getting a standard contents insurance policy.

On top of this, it’s also worth looking at adding on an additional accidental damage insurance policy to your contents insurance. This would help to protect you if you damage any of your belongings by accident.

For example, if you accidentally dropped your laptop down the stairs or break a vase by knocking it over, accidental damage insurance would cover any repairs or replacements. This could come in handy if you broke something by accident or incident.

General wear and tear isn’t included in accidental damage policies – so if your smartphone just stopped working after a few years, you couldn’t claim. However, if you accidentally smashed it on the floor, you could claim for this.

Find out all of the important facts about accidental damage insurance with our blog.

Your responsibilities

As you’re a renter, you won’t need a buildings insurance policy, just contents. This is because it’s your landlord’s responsibility to look after the upkeep of the building – so if something goes wrong with the plumbing, it’s not up to you to fix this.

When you’re looking for a policy that offers accidental damage, it might be worth seeing if it also includes ‘tenants’ liability cover’. This covers you if you accidentally damage anything in your property that belongs to your landlord.

For example, if you break a window or spill red wine on the carpet, a policy with tenants’ liability protection would cover you for this. If you’ve not got this extra type of insurance and you do damage something in your property belonging to your landlord, you’ll probably have to pay for this or your landlord will retain some of your rental deposit when you move out.

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