Q's about contents insurance

[Jennifer13]

You can theoretically, within reason, but you won't receive the full amount if you try to claim for everything. So if you say your contents are worth $100K (and you pay your premium based on this) but then the house burns down and everything is only valued at $75K, then that's all you'd get. So it's be a bit silly to pay a higher premium when there's no way you'd get away with receiving what you've asked for.

And since you do have to itemise everything it's actually very hard to try to claim for something that wasn't there. Items of significant value on their own do need to be specified in the policy (hence the caps on things like DVDs, etc, too, to stop ppl trying to say they had a $30K DVD collection to 'make up' the full amount).

Overinsurance is more of an issue though with house or business insurance, rather than contents. By the far the majority of ppl are under-insured, since they don't change their policy when big new items are bought or review it every year it falls due. Or they don't take into account that prices go up with inflation.