AA Insurance are asking all owners of holiday homes to make sure their insurance polices cover items that are left there while the property is empty.
The summer months see many people heading off to their second homes, taking a break from the daily grind. However AA Insurance want them to just think about what they may be leaving at the property and to ensure they have adequate home insurance cover in place. Their data suggests more than 10 percent of people do not know if it is adequate or not.
A spokesman from AA Insurance also wanted to remind people to take basic security precautions during the warmer weather. These include closing and locking windows when the property is empty, locking front doors if people are in the back garden and so on.
A recent study by Tesco Finance has looked at the damage we do in our own homes and found some startling results.
Children are one of the major culprits when it comes to damage around the home, racking up over GBP136 million worth of home insurance damage claims per year. Following on in value is the effects of alcohol, costing around GBP95 million in broken items and stains caused by spills. Following on from these is the damage caused by family pets, with a total of GBP87 million worth of damage every year from our faithful friends.
The biggest source of claims, for Tesco home insurance at least, is what they are calling horse play. Just messing around leads to a massive GBP325 million worth of damage and accounts for 25 percent of all contents insurance claims.
According to data collated by the Halifax home insurance division people in the UK have a bicycle stolen at a rate of just over one every minute.
The actual rate is one every sixty-five seconds, worsening from one every seventy-one seconds last year. The data also shows that London is the most dangerous place to own a bicycle, perhaps unsurprising as the bike is a popular form of transport in major cities like this. A Halifax spokesman suggested a simple way to cut the rate of bike theft would be to use a simple U shaped lock when the bike is left unattended.
The Halifax insurance spokesman also suggested looking at garden security, since many bicycles are kept in garden sheds or just in the back garden itself. Simple security is not expensive and could mean a home insurance claim is not needed.
