Is Your Insurance Coverage Up to Date?

Costs are rising to repair or replace your most valuable assets. Make sure your home and vehicles are adequately insured.

- DAVID RODECK

IMAGINE that after dutifully paying your auto or homeowners insurance premium for years you finally try to make a claim, only to get a nightmare answer: Your insurer won’t pay for all the damages or, even worse, won’t cover you at all.

It’s a situation that happens more often than you may think. “People usually discover this shortage only when they’re filing a claim,” says Mary Parsons, executive vice president of personal risk services at Chubb. “By then, it’s too late.”

Auto and homeowners insurance policies limit how much they’ll pay for damage and other losses. These policies also have exclusions that catch people off-guard. For that reason, it’s important to understand how well you’re protected and whether there are any gaps you should fill before you run into an insurance issue.

Property damage is a hot topic these days, as climate change has led to unpredictable and damaging weather patterns and more-intense natural disasters, ranging from wildfires in California to blizzards in the Midwest to hurricanes in the Southeast. Nearly one-third of homeowners say they’ve been negatively impacted by a harmful weather event over the past five years. The vast majority of those affected expect it will happen again soon, according to a 2023 survey from the Insurance Information Institute (III).

The risk of weather damage is so high in some areas that major insurers are rethinking whether to provide coverage. For example, Allstate and State Farm recently decided to stop selling new property insurance policies in California. Auto insurers, meanwhile, have their own concerns. There’s been a post-pandemic surge in dangerous behavior, such as speeding and impaired driving, and traffic fatalities are at a 16-year high.