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How we picked theseWe crunch eligible home insurance products in Australia to see how they stack up. We rank over 50 products on 16 different features, including price. We end up with a single score out of 10 that helps you compare home insurance a bit faster. We assess home and contents, building only and contents only products individually.
Total replacement home insurance (sometimes called complete replacement home insurance) works like this: if an insured event like a fire or storm destroys your home, it can cover the cost of rebuilding your property to its previous state.
Most home insurance policies don't do this; with most, you select how much you want to insure your property for (sum insured).
Total replacement cover home insurance policies reduce the gap between the amount your home is insured for and what it actually costs to rebuild the home to its original condition. As a result, they tend to cost more.
The often cheaper alternative is a sum insured safeguard. This is a "safety net" that can provide up to an additional 30% of cover on top of your sum insured if your home is destroyed.
There are two main types of home insurance available:
| Total replacement cover | Sum insured cover |
|---|---|
| You don’t set a cover limit. | You set a cover limit. |
| The insurer pays the total cost of rebuilding your home. | The insurer pays up to your limit if your home is damaged by an insured event. |
| It's worth considering if you don’t know how much it will cost to rebuild your home. | Often the only way to insure your home. |
| The best protection against underinsurance. | Has a higher risk of underinsurance. |
Calculating the replacement cost of your home is tricky. That's because the average person doesn't usually have insights into the costs of building materials and labor required to build a home.
There's also a difference between what your home costs to rebuild and what your home is valued at. If you insure your home for what it's valued at, you'll probably end up paying more than you need to. At the other end of that, if you underestimate the cost to rebuild, you run the risk of underinsurance.
To calculate your building replacement cost, the Insurance Council of Australia recommends:
When it comes to calculating the cost of your contents, that's a bit easier because you were typically involved in the buying of those items. Remember to include things your house may have already come with, like the oven, dishwasher and ducted aircon. If you've done a renovation and upgraded the carpet or floorboards, be sure to account for those sorts of things too.
"The goal is to cover every big ticket item so that if you lost it all, you wouldn't find yourself out of pocket. This can add up quite quickly and it means that your premium might also increase as your sum insured does. If you're trying to bring your premium down, you can opt to only include items that really matter to you. For example, if you know your fancy oven costs $7,000 to replace but you'd be happy to replace it with a $1,500 one, you could opt to only cover $1,500 worth. It's really about what you'd be okay with going without and what you deem as necessary to cover."
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