Homeowners insurance is helpful. But, it doesn’t cover all items. A floater policy ensures that you will get the full value of all your property in the case of damage, theft, or loss.
What is Personal Property Floater Insurance?
The typical homeowner’s insurance policy has a lot of coverage—they typically cover all damage caused because of vandalism, theft, fire, and more. However, there are certain limits with specific valuables.
That’s where personal property floater insurance comes in handy. It covers personal property you can move easily. It provides extra personal insurance which is above and beyond what you can find in normal insurance policies.
It can be written as a Homeowners Policy with form (HO 04 61) written on an “open peril basis” (meaning loss due to direct physical damage of property), or it can stand alone as a separate policy.
For instance, jewelry and other small items are easy to move or float around, so the risk with these items is higher. To keep coverage affordable, the typical homeowner policy only covers these items to a certain extent.
In other words, the insurer won’t pay more than a certain amount for any valuable item. It doesn’t matter how much it’s worth.
What Does It Cover?
Personal property floater insurance covers valuable belongings that require more coverage than you can get with the standard insured homeowner policy. This is usually because of certain limitations and exclusions on homeowners’ coverage.
You can use this type of insurance to protect:
- Jewelry
- Fur coats
- Antiques
- Sports memorabilia and other collectibles
- Stereo equipment
- Sculptures
- Fine arts (
- Cameras
- Bicycles
- Musical instruments
- Silverware/china/crystal
- Stamps and coin collections
- Guns
- Golfing equipment
There’s no such thing as a standard floater policy.
These types of policies usually cover one item. So if you have several items you want full coverage for, get a floater for each.
Most of them share the same four basic traits:
- You can tailor them to insure a specific piece of property
- You can select the appropriate policy limit for the property
- Written on all risk basis. This means they cover all physical losses to the property, except for specifically excluded losses.
- They cover property anywhere in the world. The only exception is fine arts—it’s only covered in the United States, its territories and possessions, and Canada.
What Are The Limitations?
There are some limits to personal property floater insurance.
They include:
- It doesn’t cover the property for deterioration, wear and tear, or inherent vices.
- It doesn’t cover the property if vermin or insects cause the loss.
When you have valuable property, you must make sure you cover it from all hazards. Personal property floater insurance will do just that.
Following a loss the carrier will pay the least of the following:
- Actual cash value
- Repair amount to reach conditions that existed before the loss
- Cost to replace item with one “substantially identical” item
- The amount of insurance specified in the policy