Homeowner’s insurance covers many situations where a person may lose valuables. Generally, it includes appliances, furniture, damage to the home, etc.
Therefore, many people with this insurance wonder if homeowner’s insurance covers theft of cash.
What happens to my homeowner’s insurance if cash is stolen?
When cash is stolen inside your home, the issue can be quite different from other types of stolen property.
The insurer generally has a low maximum payout limit when cash is stolen. Unlike other properties, with cash, most of the time, the full amount lost is not recovered.
Many times, what is recognized by the insurer is only a small amount of all the money stolen. The limit is usually no more than $200 or $300.
Most of the time, even if you lose a large amount of money, such as thousands of dollars, the insurer will only cover that amount.
In other words, although insurers cover the amount of the stolen cash, this amount may be small compared to the theft. Therefore, the idea is to keep it in banks, financial institutions or investments.
In addition, whether or not you receive this money will often depend on if you have a way to corroborate that the money was in your home and was stolen. If there is no way to prove it, you may not receive it.
Do all insurers cover the same amount?
The amounts mentioned in the previous section are an average of coverage among various insurance companies in the country. Therefore, this amount may vary depending on the policy offered by each insurer.
The difference in cash theft insurance between one insurer and another is usually not very noticeable. Most of the time, they are similar values that do not exceed $300.
Even so, there may be cases where this coverage is not offered and others where the coverage is considerably high, up to thousands of dollars.
Before signing your insurance company’s policy, you should read the small letters that specify if this type of coverage is favourable or not to the homeowner.
If you already have the policy, the best thing to do is to call the insurance company directly and ask if they have coverage for cash theft and how much the maximum limit is.
When you have a large amount of cash in your home and do not plan to spend it or take it to a financial institution, the ideal is to have higher coverage of this type with your insurer.
A higher policy for cash theft coverage depends on whether the insurer wants to do it, which can be considerably expensive. It is almost always best to reconsider leaving cash at home.
Why do they cover such a small amount?
Regardless of the type of insurance or policy, insurers always try to reduce risks. And cash can be a big risk because of its inability to be traced.
Likewise, if cash theft coverage policies were very high, many people may claim that they had cash in their home and it was stolen.
It is impossible to corroborate that the policyholder was robbed of the amount of money as they claim. Even if you have cameras in your home, the cameras probably cannot prove how much money you have.
Also, it is easy to steal a large amount of cash. It only takes a small space in your pocket to carry $10,000 in 100-dollar bills.
On the other hand, taking $10,000 in valuables can be much more complicated. For insurers, it is preferable to target what is difficult to steal.
For the same reason, they also tend not to offer extensive jewellery coverage. It is easy to steal a large amount in value in just a handful of jewels.