renter's insurance

I've had Travelers for 13 years and they've never paid had to pay a claim.

It's going to be hard to get both "reasonably priced" and "jewelry". For most apartments, a good jewelry rider will cost as much as the whole rest of the policy (if you've got jewelry which is meaningful enough to get insured).

i took out a policy, including a rider with state farm.

thanks.

chubb

Longtime State Farm client here. No problems thus far (but have never needed to file a claim, ergo, I am a perfect customer).

Travelers.

Thank you all. Ended up going with Travelers as most others would not insure in a building with more than 100 units.

We also use State Farm. Jewelry is included in our policy. Seems reasonably priced to me but we don't have a lot of valuables beyond electronics and a few diamonds.

oh, i see you decided :)...i never read these things thoroughly!

YOU NEVER READ THESE THINGS THOROUGHLY ???????? Fie, fie - too busy looking at all those diamonds, huh? ;-)

But you fit right in, uwsmom.

I have very modest diamonds...perhaps more modest than my husband's electronics, which is what prompted the NEED for renters insurance....the jewelry was an afterthought.

How can you comment on how good your insurance company is if they've never paid a claim? It's fairly easily to take your money and send you a policy on an annual basis and occaisonally process your endorsements. The truth about insurance; you get what you pay for. If you have $100,000 loss for your personal contents and are paying $210 a year, logically, how can the math work, it can't. You pay a little, you should expect exactly the same on your claim settlement. No joke. If you really want to indemnify yourself with a NYC renters policy, pick Chubb.

"If you really want to indemnify yourself with a NYC renters policy, pick Chubb."

Unfortunately they are not as phenomenally great as they used to be (they are still the best, though). Fireman's Fund did come out with a competing product to Chubb - just make sure that you're not buying "regular" Fireman's Fund renters insurance and are getting - I think they call it "Premier" or "Prestige". Depending on what your other insuraqnce needs are, you can get packages which will cost substantially less in some instances (because, for example, Chubb isn't great on car insurance in terms of cost vs service, so if you have a couple of cars and want a bundled insurance, the Chubb policy can run a LOT of money and not be all that substantially better).

Actually jewelry isn't necessarily expensive to insure. We have a Chubb policy with a separate jewelry rider and it's the least expensive part of the policy (usually with a separate rider there is no deductible).

There are different ways to insure jewelry -- for example, you can insure each individual piece or alternatively, you can pay a blanket sum which makes sense if you think the odds of losing everything at once is pretty slim. With this method, say you own $100,000 of jewelry but no individual piece is valued for more than $5,000, you could carry $25,000 or $50,000 in coverage gauging the risk that worst case, you may lose or have stolen up to 50% of your jewelry. If you work with a good insurance broker, they can take you through the various options. Putting a safe in your apartment is also an idea if you don't want to insure the full value of your jewelry.

To me Chubb is in its own league. You don't know how good an insurer is until you have a claim and we had a water leak experience several years back and Chubb was phenomenal -- fast, supportive, non-bureaucratic. Plus our rates didn't go up afterwards. A few years previously we had Allstate as our coop homeowners and with a far less damaging leak, they were useless. As if we had no insurance at all.

But how much more is Chubb? The difference can be upwards of $2,000 a year. Over 10 years, that's $20,000. So if you have one claim for $15,000 and the worse insurance pays $0 and Chubb pays 100%, you are still ahead with the "bad" insurance.

you don't pay for the $15K scenario -- you pay for the total flood, burst pipe or fire. What if you lost all your belongings. I'd rather have a check for $600K to go shopping and try to rebuild rather than fight with some crappy insurance company.

I agree: that's why I carry the amount of insurance I do (but in reality, in a Coop, you don't pay anyway for all that damage because a burst pipe almost always occurs in a place where it's the building's responsibility). I was just pointing out that for most people, it's not a "no brainer" and most of the time you end up OUT a non-insubstantial sum. But it's insurance: that's what the game is all about. The biggest reason in my mind to have it is that when stuff happens, you don't have to spend time sorting it out; just collect the check from YOUR insurer and let them go after whoever.