WHY WOULD I NEED RENTERS INSURANCE?
What if you are a tenant and your home caught fire? Would you be protected? Most people assume that a fire or water damage is never going to happen to them so why waste money on renters insurance. You take all the right precautions to prevent fires at home you think. You unplug all electrical cords when leaving the home, blow out your candles at night and have a fire extinguisher nearby when cooking. No matter what you do property damage is unpredictable. The only way you can prepare for it is by making sure you have renters insurance if you are a tenant.
Take this picture for example. What if the home on the left caught fire? Flames grow higher and higher while giant gusts of wind force neighboring flames onto your building. Your building has now suffered a fire and you most likely have too.
One thing to consider is if the person who caused the fire had renter's insurance, which would include liability insurance. You may have a legal claim against the neighbor but if you didn’t have money for a small monthly renter’s insurance fee will you have enough money for a lawyer? You may have some recourse as to having the right to cancel your lease if your apartment is not reasonably habitable but what about your damaged items?
Did you know that your landlord is not obligated to replace your contests if they were damaged? The landlord’s ONLY responsibility is to restore the structure. Visualize picking up a building and turn it upside down while shaking it. Everything that falls out is considered contents while the part that stays intact is the structure. The contents are your personal property and you are responsible for replacing them.
If your apartment suffers a fire there are not many options to restore you property or replace your property if you do not have renters insurance. Most of your items will be so badly damaged by the gallons of water used to put out the fire they cannot be salvaged. If wet items have been left in the boarded up building while the fire is under investigation and other procedures prolong your re entry then wet items will soon become moldy. Items that did not get wet may be so badly damaged by smoke you will not be able to clean them with house hold cleaners alone. Bringing your clothes to the laundromat is not really an option since basic laundry soaps cannot remove contaminates that have been embedded into the clothing. Smoke damaged textiles must be taken to professional cleaners and their services will be costly for cleaning these special items. Without renters insurance the only financial support you can receive is from the Red Cross. Just once will they offer a small amount of money so there is usually just enough money to provide you with a hotel for the night. Not much is typically left over to feed and clothe your entire family for a few days. Without renters insurance you now have the financial stress of where you are going to live aside from how you are going to replace all over your destroyed items. Restoration companies can provide no assistance in restoring salvageable items if you do not have insurance or the means to pay for these services.
Definition of Renter's Insurance - A form of property insurance that provides coverage for a policy holder's belongings and liability within a rental property.
Renters insurance protects against more than you may think. From a property standpoint, it also protects against theft, vandalism, and even renters insurance named perils unlikely to be found in most apartments. If someone steals something of yours then it can be replaced by your renters insurance. If your property is damaged by malicious mischief, you can be made whole. If someone else even causes damage within your unit and the damage carries over to your neighbors unit then the liability part of your renters insurance could cover this damage even though you didn't personally cause it.
According to KPHO News, any given household has a one in four chance of having a fire large enough to be reported to a fire department in a lifetime. In America some consider the average of daily fires to range aground 1,024 nationwide. If this is an accurate risk than those odds are astronomical. Just because you haven’t experienced a loss in the past does not guarantee you will never see it happen. You can’t let your past experience of luck affect your perception of future statistics. Even if you don’t personally cause damage to your items you have no idea what your neighbor might do. Any one person with more than four neighbors is highly likely to suffer a loss caused by a fire during his lifetime, even if it’s not their home that has the fire. I personally seen an entire three floor brick building in Chicago get whiped out because the second floor tenant caused a fire while cooking chicken nuggets. None of the tenants had renters insurance and virtually everything was destroyed. I was only able to offer guidance as I carried a single box of salvage items to a woman’s car as she stood there and cried. True story! Protect yourself from the unknown by obtaining renters insurance.
Link to KPO News: http://www.kpho.com/story/19775901/homes-face-1-in-4-odds-of-major-fire
