We don't have health insurance yet. It never seemed worth it because the cost outweighed what we were covered for, when we were able to afford treatments ourselves - especially with Medicare. However, now that we have two kids and DH turns 30 next weekend, we've started looking into it. It's been a bit overwhelming because I don't want to spend heaps and feel like if I take off some of the extras our luck will be so that that's what we need.

We have car insurance, even insurance over the motorbike that's worth only $1k. I don't care if it's stolen or damaged, but I do care if DH is at fault in an accident that causes damage, injury or death and I want to be covered for that.

W have home and contents insurance. The home insurance value is worked out with a calculator, you give the age of the house, size, what it's made of, etc etc and it works out the value. If our house was valued at $300k, it burned to the ground and cost $400k to rebuild, then that entire cost would be covered, it's not capped. The contents insurance was made a little easier by the fact that we were moving and had a good idea of what we had and the value, but we do need to revisit now that we have two kids with lots of stuff.

We've got landlord insurance, but we recently had old pipes break under the house, resulting in the ground swelling and the house lifting in the centre, cracking the walls. The repairs and loss of rent weren't covered because it was caused by "movement of the earth". Apparently it doesn't matter why the earth moved. So we paid $5,800 ourselves to fix it all and we're now looking into other companies.

We've got life, TPD, income replacement and trauma insurances. I believe these to be the most important of all our insurances. If things were tight I'd let the others lapse before these.

All insurances except the bike are through my work because I get a discount (they don't cover bikes). I believe though that if we shop around we'll be able to get a better deal elsewhere for the landlord insurance - something that actually covers repairs and stuff.