When you own a home, most of your worldly goods are likely kept there. Not to mention that the home itself could be your most valuable possession.
Yet property is vulnerable. Even if you do your best to maintain it, natural disasters, theft and vandalism, fires, and other sorts of damage can seriously damage or wipe out your investment—not to mention leave you without a habitable place in which to live.
That's why people turn to insurance coverage. In fact, if you took out a mortgage on your home, your lender probably required you to buy homeowners' insurance. But even without that requirement, most people find that homeowners' insurance is an important protection against unexpected losses or damage.
Not all insurance policies are created equally, however. Whether you are in the process of buying insurance now, or are curious what your policy says about recent loss or damage to your property, it's important to understand both what the standard policies contain and what extra coverage you should or did purchase.
Sometimes the difference between receiving coverage or not is a matter of fine print, or of researching what the most likely sources of damage are and ensuring that your policy contains a realistic amount of coverage for them.
