Replacement cost on the house doesn't cover the ring.

Replacement cost is about how a covered loss is valued rather than about how much of it is covered, and those are different questions.

It means a covered item is settled at what it costs to replace rather than at what it was worth after depreciation. It does not remove the limits and it does not remove the caps that sit inside your contents coverage for particular categories of property. So a policy can be written on a replacement cost basis and still pay far less than expected for a ring, a gun collection or a piece of art, because the cap for that category is reached long before the overall contents limit is. The same distinction applies to liability. Replacement cost has nothing to do with it at all. Your liability limit was almost certainly set as a default when the policy was written and it reflects the house rather than what you would actually stand to lose. Both of those are ordinary features of a standard policy rather than defects in it.

A homeowners policy covers your belongings up to your contents limit, but inside that limit it applies much lower caps to specific categories, and those caps apply regardless of how much total contents coverage you carry.

Jewellery is the one people meet most often, and it is commonly capped particularly tightly for theft. Firearms, silverware, furs and money are typically capped as well. Some forms also limit collectibles, business property kept at home and property away from the residence. We are not publishing the figures, because they vary by form and by carrier and a number read off a web page invites you to measure your own ring against the wrong one. The number that matters is the one on your policy. The caps are not a defect and they are not hidden, and they exist because insuring high-value individual items properly is a different exercise from insuring the general contents of a house.

We are not going to put a number on a web page, because a limit that is sensible for one household is meaningless for another and because a figure published to strangers is a recommendation without any of the facts behind it.

What we will say is the question you should be asking, which is different from the one most people ask. The usual question is what limit came with the policy. The useful question is what you would stand to lose if you were found responsible for something serious. Liability limits on a homeowners policy are typically set as a default when the policy is written, and that default reflects the house rather than the household. Savings, investments, equity and future earnings do not appear anywhere in that calculation, and they are exactly what is exposed when a judgment exceeds a policy limit. A personal umbrella is the practical answer because it lifts the home and the auto liability together rather than one at a time.

Four lines, and the first one is the local one described above.

Then the loss settlement provision and the endorsement list, for anything affecting how a roof or other major component is paid. Then the deductible section, to see whether there is a separate wind and hail figure and whether it is expressed as a percentage of your dwelling limit rather than as a flat amount, because a percentage is a considerably larger number than most people realise. Then the dwelling limit itself, read as what it would cost to rebuild today rather than as what the house would sell for. And finally your liability limit, which is almost always a default nobody chose. Those cover most of what actually goes wrong on a home policy. If you would rather someone else read it, send us the declarations page or upload it to Coverage Compare and you will get a written answer without anyone ringing you about it.

No.

A fair number of the reviews we do end with us saying the policy is already right, and that is a perfectly good outcome. We would rather be the agency you call in three years when something has changed than the one that pushed you into moving before there was a reason to. What a review costs you is the time it takes to find your declarations page and a short conversation. What it is worth is knowing where you stand rather than assuming. If it turns out that a different market fits your house better, we will say so and show you why. If it does not, you will have spent twenty minutes and learned what your policy actually does, which is more than most homeowners can say.

Because appetite differs enormously between companies, and a single company can only ever offer you its own answer.

A captive agent has one carrier's rules to work with, so when that carrier does not want a house, or prices it oddly, there is nothing else to point at. We place business across more than forty carriers, which means the same property gets looked at by several sets of rules rather than one. That matters most on the houses that are not straightforward, which in this region is a great many of them. It also means we are able to tell you that your current coverage is already competitive, because we have nothing to gain from moving it if it is. What it costs you is a declarations page and a conversation.