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What is Dwelling Coverage on Your Home Insurance Policy?
Dwelling coverage on your home insurance policy is the coverage that helps pay for the rebuilding or the replacement of damage to the actual structure, physical structure of your home.
What Does Dwelling Coverage Cover?
Dwelling coverage covers the actual physical structure of your home, things like the walls of your home, the roof, the floor, fixtures, anything that is permanently attached to the actual physical structure of your home. The dwelling can be damaged by a number of different things.
Fire, lightning, wind, hell, explosion, vandalism. All of these things are things that can damage the dwelling of your home. And all of these things are things that are typically covered under a normal home insurance policy.
What Does Dwelling Coverage Not Cover?
Dwelling coverage does not cover things that are not part of the actual structure of your home or things that are not permanently attached to that structure. So for example think of a detached garage or a detached workshop in your backyard. These things are not permanently attached to the actual dwelling, the home where you live.
And so these things would not fall under dwelling coverage. You can also think of things like your personal property, your furniture, your children’s toys, your computers, things to that nature are not part of the physical structure of your home and therefore they are not covered under the dwelling coverage.
All of those things I mentioned that are not covered under your dwelling coverage, have other coverages under a home insurance policy where you can make sure you have these things covered. So don’t worry that I said those specific things are not covered. There are other ways to cover those types of things.
Do You Need Dwelling Coverage on Your Home Insurance Policy?
Yes you absolutely need it. In fact there is no way to purchase a home insurance policy without having dwelling coverage. If you own a home and you have a mortgage, your mortgage company is going to require you to have dwelling coverage and for most people your home is your largest asset.
You need to protect it by getting the correct dwelling coverage.
How Much Dwelling Coverage Do You Need?
The independent insurance broker that you work with will run an estimation called an RCE or a replacement cost estimator. What this does is it takes all the factors of your home into consideration, puts them into a calculation and it spits back a number that tells the broker you’re working with how much dwelling coverage you need. Or in other words if your home were to burn completely to the ground, how much it would cost to rebuild your home the way it was before. This is the amount of dwelling coverage that you need.
And the only way to find that out is to speak with an independent insurance broker. One important tip is make sure when you’re speaking with this independent broker that you give them all the information about your home and don’t hold back. Don’t say “i don’t know if I should tell them that or tell them this”, tell them everything so that they can enter in all the correct information and get the correct calculation back and therefore insure your dwelling coverage for the correct amount.
How Much Does Dwelling Coverage Cost on Your Home Insurance Policy?
Like all things with most insurance coverages, that depends. We have one video. You can reference it here that talks about how we calculate those things, but for short reference, we take a number of things into consideration actually, hundreds of things into consideration.
Things like the age of the home, the size of the home, where the home is, the type of roof. The type of flooring, the list goes on and on and on. So the best way to find out how much it costs is to speak with an independent insurance broker. And they will be able to take all those factors into consideration and get you the best coverage at the best price.