You’ve been house hunting for months and you’ve finally found the perfect house. It’s a gorgeous four bedroom, three and a half bath colonial in a quaint neighborhood, and it’s the perfect price. You buy it and then you find out that it would cost you a ton of money to get homeowner’s insurance on the place. I bet you never even considered how much it would cost to insure the place when you bought it. I know this because when I bought a house, I never even thought about how much it would cost to insure the place. Luckily, it didn’t come back to haunt me… but it could’ve.
So, what can you do? One good indicator of a home’s insurability can be found in the Claims Loss Underwriting Exchange, or CLUE, a database of insurance claims. CLUE is operated by Choice Point and it will contain all the claims on the property - a great indicator of what could be in store for you. Well, you can’t get a CLUE report unless you own the property so you’ll need to ask the owner of the home to get it for you. With how the housing market is now, it shouldn’t be a big deal for them to provide that sort of information.
What’s next? Just call up an insurance company, provide the details of the home, and get a quote. Let them know that you’re thinking about buying the home and they’ll gladly give you an idea of how much insurance will cost on the place.
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Budgeting home insurance and taxes should be a very important part of your home buying decision. I like you informing readers to consider this before buying their new home. You can raise deductibles, include security features such as a home security system, dead bolts, fire alarms to help offset the cost of your homeowners insurance. Most people consider insurance cost before buying a car, so why would you not before making a bigger purchase such as a home? Just talk with your agent, ask about combining your home and auto insurance together to save even more money, I am sure any agent will be glad to answer any of your questions.
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[...] Our first day on the trail, we met another family originally from Chicago. They had bought a house in Chicago, but it had lots of previous claims and was uninsurable. They’re upset they didn’t look up the claims history on the property before they purchased. So they sold the house, packed up, and started heading west instead. [...]
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