House Insurance Question
 

I didn't know which forum this belongs in but I figured OT gets the most traffic. I already searched and couldn't find anything related to home insurance, only car.

I'm shopping for a house insurance and I'm curious if any of you guys have recommendations. I got some quotes and Canadian Direct is HALF the price of all the competitors. Anyone have any experience with CD? It seems a bit shady to be able to purchase an insurance plan half the price of others.

Also, is it preferable to go with a blanket limit or capped per category.

TIA.

check out Wawanesa if you havent already

Most of the homeowner policy wordings are pretty general and offers similar types of coverage. The difference is what "kind" of coverage you want to purchase ie.. board homeowner, all risk/comprehensive homeowner and the gold/preferred homeowners.

I would recommend that you obtain a copy of the Homeowner's policy from your broker to determine the types of coverage they provide. Each Insurer offers different amount of "sub-limit" coverage. Ie...jewelry limits up to anywhere from $4000 to $7000..etc etc.. You have to read the policy carefully! it's alot of work but it may be worth it.

Another thing to remember is to purchase adequate coverage for your building. Most people neglect this and usually under-insure the building. When they encounter a big claim (ie..fire) and need to rebuild their building, they bitch and whine about how insurance company is trying to "cheat" them when they didn't purchase enough coverage in the first place.

IMO, you get what you pay for....

hope this helps....

The quotes I've been given have all been fairly consistent in the coverage they provide, except that Canadian Direct offers a blanket limit over several categories. That and the main difference is the price; Canadian Direct is HALF of what all the other companies offer. Too good to be true?

Read and understand the exclusions carefully. There are differences between companies...and one word can make all the difference.

CDI is a cheaper partly because they sell direct to you and they do not pay commissions to a broker.

You do pay a little more when getting insurance from a broker, however, they are their to help explain policies, the differences between companies, and they will give you the option of several difference insurance companies to buy from. CDI will only sell themselves to you.

As CivicS said, you do get what you pay for...

Get a price from BCAA, although I've never checked Canadian Direct, BCAA was 50% cheaper then what I was using before.

I have a 2 year old 5 bedroom house and I pay $750 a year. That doesn't really tell you the whole picture though because of different coverage but I'd at least get a price and compare. If you're insuring a condo or townhouse it would be a lot less because your just insuring contents and not the building itself.

One good thing about BCAA is they don't hassle you if you have a claim. My mom has had a couple claims on her policy and it was never a problem. For her floor claim they didn't even send anyone out, approved it over the phone.

like someone else said, READ THE EXCLUSIONS. I can't stress that strongly enough, claims people hate to tell the insured's that they aren't covered due to the way the policy wordings are written and then have to listen to 20-30mins of the bitching that comes after.

i would say look specifically for their exclusions on water damage as that's a pretty common type of damage (depending on where you're located).

i would like to say though that if something sounds too good to be true, it generally is.

yo i got a contact who does house/car insurance. msn me n i'll pass the info along..
her office is right in front of douglas.

Thanks for all the response. I'll definitely check out BCAA. I'm not dealing with a broker at the moment; just directly calling each individual insurance company for a quote. I'll look more into the exclusion part; I thought all the coverage were similar because the things they covered were fairly consistent; property, dwelling, inside contents, earthquake etc.

Keep the input coming!

i'd say ask people about their claims experiences with the companies that you're looking to insure with.

insurance is to make sure you're covered when there's a claim, when that happens you'll obviously be frustrated and want things resolved quickly. so i would think that quality of claims service is important to look into.

Even better! Tell me about your experience with an insurance company when making a claim.

you can talk to RPI insurance, they deal with more than one company and will get a quote from all for you

can't say much since i haven't made any claims..

i can explain to you what to expect during the claims process, but sorry no first hand experience from me.

Wawanesa will under quote everyone else to get your business then 6 months into your policy, they want double the amount. Happen to someone I know and they went to cancel their policy at the insurance agency that sold it to them and told them what happened. The agency said that they got a lot of complaints about Wawanesa about this issue and have stop pushing their insurance.