Your house is your home - and you need to protect it. Most insurance companies provide you with insurance for both buildings and contents to keep your household and garden insured against damage and loss.

Online home insurance providers lets you manage either your building insurance policy, contents insurance policy or both buildings and contents policy in your own time - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Why bother with call centres and automated phone lines? Buying online saves you time while reducing the cost of your home insurance.

Whether you own or rent your property, whether it's a terraced, semi, bungalow, detached or a townhouse, many insurance companies can provide competitive home insurance quotes online.

Distinguish between Building and Contents Insurance

Buildings Insurance protects you against damage to the bricks and mortar and permanent fixtures and fittings. It also usually covers outbuildings like your garage, greenhouse or garden shed. If you're a leaseholder, you don't usually need to have this cover. The freeholder does.

Contents Insurance protects you against damage to or loss of anything you'd normally take with you if you moved furniture, kitchen equipment, television, computer and audio equipment, clothing and valuables.

Both types of home insurance cover against a range of perils including fire, subsidence, theft, flood, lightning and storm. They also provide important cover for your legal liabilities as a homeowner. To read  for more information - Click here...

Choose the right level of cover 

Make sure you buy the right amount of cover, or any claim you come to make could be rejected or reduced pro rata. In other words, if you are under insured and in the event of a claim, the Insurance company could reject or only pay you a reduced amount. With buildings insurance you need to insure for the cost of rebuilding the property, which is likely to be less than its market value. You might find the rebuild figure on your mortgage survey or you can have it assessed by a surveyor. With contents insurance, there are two main ways to get cover. It's a good idea to get quotes for both types: 

1. A bedroom-rated policy is based on the number of bedrooms your home has (often subject to a maximum amount of cover) 

2. A sum-insured policy is where you work out how much cover you need, from which the insurer calculates your premium (regular policy payment) 

If you need to use a calculater, you can find one here - Click Here 

New-for-Old and indemnity policies 

The better contents policies replace damaged or stolen goods on a new-for-old basis, which means you'll either be paid the full cost of repairing damaged items or the cost of replacing them with equivalent new articles if they are stolen or destroyed. Indemnity policies are cheaper but they deduct an amount for wear, tear and depreciation. Clothing and household linen can only be covered on an indemnity basis. A man's suit, for example, is only reckoned to have a life span of five years. 

Add-Ons or Extras

You can pay an additional premium to extend your insurance to cover a range of things: - 

• Personal possessions (also called 'all risks') covers loss of items when they're out of the home, for example your handbag or camera. 
• Accidental damage. Standard contents policies include some cover for accidental damage, for example glass in furniture, but not accidental damage to goods or furnishings.
• Food in your freezer  
• Bicycles
• Personal money and credit cards
• Legal expenses. To cover the cost of legal proceedings you need to bring or to defend a claim, typically in personal injury, consumer or property disputes 

High-value items 

It you have any valuable items, always check that these would be covered; if not, you may have to pay an additional premium. Some policies specify a certain value as 'high value', which may go as low as £1,000. You should keep proofs of purchase; you may be asked to get a valuation certificate for expensive items like paintings, antiques and jewellery. 

Discounts 

You may qualify to save money if you buy your buildings and contents insurance from the same company. Some insurers also offer no-claims discounts on contents insurance. Other things that may help you get a discount: 

• Fitting an approved burglar alarm
• Secure locks.
  
• Membership of a Neighbourhood Watch scheme.
  
• Increasing the voluntary excess - an amount you would pay towards any claim.

                    Do Not Be Under Insured

                            Summary of the cover provided under a Home Policy