The flood upstairs: Why you need renters insurance
Posted
Apr 25 2008, 01:27 PM
by
Donna Freedman
Rating:
Last weekend I heard the kind of frantic knocking that signals trouble for the resident manager. A tenant was banging on the door to tell me that a second-floor apartment -- not his -- was flooding.
As I ran toward the stairs, I could see moisture dripping from the first-floor hall ceiling. Upstairs, I found that a toilet had blocked and overflowed. Later, a water-damage restoration specialist would estimate it had overflowed for at least three hours.
Water seeped into two downstairs apartments and from there into the basement laundry room and parking garage. Fortunately, none of the first-floor tenants' personal belongings were damaged. But they could have been.
A three-hour toilet snafu isn't the kind of thing anyone anticipates when looking for a place to live. But you can't predict what might happen in an apartment building -- and the landlord insures only the property, not the tenants' belongings. That's why you need renters insurance.
Why you should bother
An article at MSN Money covers the basics of how renters insurance works. Annual fees generally run between $150 and $300 a year, depending on the policy.
You may be thinking, "I don't have anything expensive, so why bother?" Try this: Walk around your place and figure out how much it would cost to replace your bed, dresser, table, dishes, sheets, towels and clothes. Even if you shopped at thrift stores, it wouldn't be cheap.
Suppose your mild-mannered dachshund bites the pizza-delivery guy? What if a party guest trips over that pile of shoes at the front door? Liability coverage comes with most renters policies.
Most importantly, what would you do if your building were suddenly uninhabitable? A relative of mine who used to rent rooms in her home urged all tenants to get renters insurance. None of them did. Then came the house fire.
It took many weeks to make the place livable again. The tenants got a couple nights' worth of hotel vouchers from an emergency aid society. After that, they and their smoke-tainted clothes were on their own. Renter's insurance would have paid for "additional living expenses," i.e. somewhere else to crash.
Pay now or pay later?
Nobody wants to pay an extra $150 or more a year for a policy that may never get used. That's the nature of insurance. Deal with it. Personally, I get irritated shelling out hundreds of dollars a year in car insurance when the only at-fault accident I ever had was a fender bender back in 1982.
I understand why some people hesitate. Health insurance and car insurance seem to make sense. They're designed to protect us against that uninsured drunken driver or catastrophic illness.
By comparison, the chance of an apartment fire or a litigious visitor might seem remote. And who knows? You may live a charmed life, now and forever.
Don't count on it.
Maybe a windstorm will topple a tree onto your building. Maybe an electrical short will cause a fire. Or maybe the upstairs neighbor's toilet will overflow for three hours.
