How much home insurance coverage do you really need? It may be some homeowners' instinct to insure their home for market value, but what a house would sell for is not always the amount of money it would take to rebuild it if disaster strikes. There are a plethora of considerations to keep in mind while determining how much home insurance coverage you need. According to the Triple-I, these include:
  • Is your home is up to current building codes, and how much it would cost to bring it to code during a covered repair?
  • If you have an older home, will you need coverage for hard-to-replace features?
  • If building material costs rise, will your replacement coverage be sufficient?
Of course, you'll also need to include coverage for your personal possessions. The best way to determine how much personal property coverage you need is to conduct a home inventory. When recording your possessions, consider whether you want to insure them for actual cash value or for replacement cost. There are limits on how much coverage a standard homeowners policy will allow for things like jewelry, silverware, collectibles and furs, so you may need to purchase a floater or endorsement to cover these items. Two of the biggest influences on how much it would cost to rebuild a home are local construction costs and the size of the structure, but in the slideshow above, we'll look at eight other major contributors to reconstruction costs, courtesy of the Triple-I.

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