Understand Home Maintenance for Homeowners Insurance

Video Transcript

"I'm Romie Brown. On behalf of Expert Village, I'm here to discuss your tips and tidbits on how to buy homeowner's insurance. In this clip, we're going to talk about how to properly maintain the home. As we discussed earlier, you have the home insured. You're living in the home. It's your responsibility to properly maintain the home to prevent further losses, or prevent any losses if you can. Most people get confused with homeowner's insurance and think of it as quote-unquote, "a maintenance policy". If you look what is going on in the insurance industry in the last ten years, they have been restricting coverage?s to make sure that the consumer understands that the homeowner's policy is a catastrophe type policy. A certain change type policy. Not a maintenance policy. Let me give you an example. If a pipe has been leaking for six months, it causes a hole in the ceiling or a dropped ceiling or what-not that is not a covered loss. That is a maintenance issue. Now let's say that lightning strikes the house and puts a hole the roof and water comes down through the roof. That is a covered loss. That is a sudden incident, a certain thing. It was not over time. So it's kind of a simple rule to look at is that if something happens over time, like the erosion of something or what-not, that is a maintenance issue that is not under the homeowner's policy. But if something happens sudden: fire, lightning, theft, those things. Those are covered under your homeowner's policy, because those are - again - sudden things. A catastrophe type situation. Don't get confused. A lot of people like to have a maintenance issue, and wait till it get to the point that it's so bad, then call the insurance agent to have it fixed, and then get upset when the claim is denied. Understand this: if we actually were a maintenance policy, your premium would be more than double, maybe triple, and then most insurance companies would probably go out of business. Because every home out there in America has something that goes wrong with it over time. But it is your duty, and my duty as a consumer, to make sure that I am taking care of that house to properly - to make sure that that house is properly covered and also maintained so I prevent future losses."