A Guide to Insurance For Your Jewelry
February 28, 2019
While a homeowners policy will cover theft of many things in your home, jewelry is not always automatically fully insured. On many standard homeowners policies, jewelry is often limitedly covered. These limitations come into play based on how much your jewelry is worth and the type of loss (fire, flood, theft, etc.). So if you want to have your jewelry fully covered by your insurance, often times you’ll need to add it to your homeowners policy.
Adding jewelry to your policy is called scheduling an item, and means your listing a special one-off item on your policy. When you schedule jewelry on your policy for the appraised value, it will cover against a variety of losses and with many policies, it won’t be subject to a deductible if there’s a loss.
Why Isn’t Jewelry Insured With My Current Policy?
The reason jewelry often doesn’t get automatically covered is that insurance companies won’t assume you own many expensive items. If insurance companies were to build valuable jewelry into the rates of a standard homeowners policy, that would raise the rate for everyone.
Speaking of insurance rates, jewelry can be affordable to insure. Often, insurance will only cost 1-2% of the total value of your jewelry per year. So if your rings and necklaces are worth $10,000 it would only cost around $100-$200/year to insure.
What’s Covered?
Theft will always be covered no matter where your jewelry is stolen from (your home, car, bag, or off your body). Additionally, if your jewelry is totally or partially damaged, or if it’s loss somewhere, your insurance will normally cover it too.
But you may be thinking, what if I give a ring or jewelry to someone else? Well if you’re living together, and you add them to the insurance policy (or if you already share a policy), it will generally still be covered under your insurance policy. However, if you do not live together, most of the time your policy will no longer cover against a loss. To make sure that the complete appraised value of your jewelry is covered under your homeowners policy, contact your insurance agent.
