Homeowner’s insurance for veterans – which insurance company (or companies) provide it, and how is the best homeowners insurance determined?

The subject of house insurance is far from our usual topic, but there’s a reason we’re addressing it.

Homeowners Insurance for Veterans

Why this topic, anyway?

Our question regarding how to determine the best homeowner’s insurance for veterans arose after a discussion of vetrepreneurs. If you’re hand-forging knives or tools in your yard, or building pallet-wood furniture in your garage, we wondered, could that fuck up a homeowners insurance claim?

That led to a discussion of riders and provisos, claims and exclusionary clauses, and all sorts of complicated shit that made our heads hurt. One thing was obvious – you want to be doing business with a good company, not a collection of assclowns. But how to make that determination?  How does someone (particularly someone with no experience in such matters) choose the best homeowners insurance for veterans?

Avoid Misinformation and Confusion About Homeowners Insurance

It’s confusing, to be sure, and there is a lot of misinformation out there (like the myth of veterans paying more for car insurance than civilians). However, just a little research should help set the record straight. Nobody wants to have bad shit happen, so hopefully you’ll never need homeowner’s insurance (or renter’s insurance, or personal injury insurance, or someone who can haul ass over to your house and clear your browser history). The enemy gets a vote, though, and life ain’t fair, so you need to have some contingency plans in place.

Thankfully there are a number of resources online to help make that determination, including the Insurance Information Institute. Whether you’re still serving active duty or you’re an honorably retired veteran (and regardless of whether you’re using a VA Home Loan), the charts and comparisons available at the III can be invaluable when determining the best house insurance for a veteran (or renters insurance, for that matter). Take for instance the entry on average premiums for homeowners and renters insurance from 2007-2016; that’s just one.

Homeowner’s Insurance Defined

Consumers Advocate describes home insurance thusly:

“Home insurance (also referred to as homeowners insurance) protects your home, property, and personal belongings from damage resulting from accidents such as fire, natural disaster, theft, and vandalism. It also includes liability coverage in case you or your property are responsible for accidents and/or bodily injury that occur in connection with your property, such as your usually harmless dog biting the mailman, a tree in your yard toppling onto your neighbor’s new sports car, or a girl scout slipping on your driveway while delivering cookies.”

Factors to Consider re: The Best Homeowner Insurance for Veterans

There are different ways to analyze such a decision beyond price, of course, but most analyses revolve (not surprisingly) around a few primary concerns. Though broken out in different ways, almost all generally follow the guidelines articulated by Consumers Advocate in their Best Homeowners Insurance Companies roundup. Those are:

• Customer service
• Pricing & discounts
• Coverage

Does this list of considerations apply to making a decision about the best home insurance for veterans specifically? Certainly, though other considerations may come into play as well, i.e. proximity to local VA care, commuting distance to an base or assignment, deployment potential, that sort of thing.

For its part, The Simple Dollar posits in a recently updated article that to determine the best home insurance, one should look at four key factors rather than three, in addition to premiums.

The four considerations they discuss are:

• Claims processing
• Customer service
• Coverage options
• Financial stability

Why do we care about the best homeowners insurance for veterans? ‘Cuz if you’re gonna protect the biggest investment of your life (unless you have a fantastic porn collection), you need to have the best house insurance possible. Recognize this house?

Reviews.com took some other things into account when they made their recommendations, ultimately rating eight of 99 companies based on the following:

• Nationwide availability
• Financial strength of the company
• Open Perils policies plus endorsements
• Customer service
• Discounts

You can see their determination(s) in the original article, which begins with a salient fact: your biggest investment deserves the best protection.

Clark Howard (who began serving in his State Guard after 9/11) references Consumer Reports and other sources for his advice deciding the best homeowners insurance for veterans, their dependents, and everybody else. According to the CH article Best and worst home insurance companies, CR asked several thousand of its readers to rank their insurance companies based on six factors. Those were:

• Ease of reaching an agent to handle the claim
• Agent courtesy
• Promptness of response and attentiveness in handling the claim
• Simplicity of the claims process (number of steps, amount of work etc.)
• Damage amount: Satisfaction with company’s estimate of dollar amount of damages
• Timely payment: Satisfaction with timely payment by insurer

What about this house? “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Other considerations for choosing the right house insurance

An additional, unfortunate thing to consider when determining the best homeowner’s insurance or renters insurance for a veteran is that of divorce or separation. Depending upon MOS, specialty code, and rate, veteran homeowners (well, all veterans, but we’re focusing on homeowners here) often have a higher rate of marital disruption than their civilian counterparts. Extended deployments, injury, the stress of PCSing, and similar hardships see to that.

If one member of a previously married couple continues to live in the marital home subsequent to the divorce, legal separation, or annulment, that person should doublecheck that the homeowners insurance is under his or her name (possibly exclusively in his or her name). The JAG office may be able to help a serving member in that event, but it cannot hurt to know ahead of time if there are any sort of drawbacks or penalties to such a policy adjustment.

Note: do not ask an insurance agent about potential complications that might arise from a divorce in front of your spouse. Just don’t.