More than a quarter of a million home insurance claims are turned down ever year because the claimants don’t have enough cover.

And as many as a quarter of the 40,000 or so householders hit by the recent floods may have no insurance at all – leaving them to foot repair bills running into thousands of pounds.

But even if you have policies to protect your home and belongings, if disaster strikes and you haven’t insured them for the right amount – or got the correct type of cover – you could be left badly out of pocket.

Prasad Shastri, head of insurance marketing at Abbey, warns: “An average of 257,000 home insurance claims are declined as a result of the policyholder not having the appropriate cover.”

If your insurer reckons you’re under covered, even if your claim is for only a fraction of your total sum insured, it will reduce its payout accordingly.

So it’s well worth spending some time adding up the value of your possessions – you may be surprised how much you’re worth.

If you need more cover, increase it.

And if you don’t have any, get some right away – economising on insurance could turn out to be a very costly mistake.

But make sure you read all the small print before you sign on the dotted line.

A cheap policy that doesn’t provide the protection you need isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 9:57 pm and is filed under UK Personal Finance, Insurance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.