I just received my bill for another year of insurance and wanted to share. I have never found a better rate than what they offer. One year of coverage on $100,000 is only $350 and the rate has been the same for many years. Adding the coverage to my homeowners would cost almost 10 times as much and require me to provide an up to date list of every coin. That's hard to do for an active collector. There are a few rules. You must be an ANA member. They require a list of only the coins worth more than $10,000 each. They won't cover coins being shipped unless you pay for a plan as a dealer at a much higher cost. I don't ship enough to make that work for me. You can go online and get a free quote if you wish. Thought this might be of help to folks here.
Yes, very helpful -- both to see a specific example of cost, and to clarify that the base plan does not cover shipment (I mistakenly thought it did). If I start collecting more actively again, getting this insurance will be high on my to-do list.
This post is well timed. I just went through the whole process myself and published a blog about coin insurance. You can read it here: https://coinphotographystudio.com/c...-101-protecting-your-valuable-coin-collection.
I'm out, the way I read that. I don't have any individual coins worth more than $10k. But I'm not sure what that line means. They only insure coins worth >$10k, or they'll insure all of them but you only have to list the >$10k coins?
There are also rules about how you store your coins above a certain value. Just before COVID, my home was burglarized and they stole about 250 trillion dollars. Of Zimbabwe money. It was stilling in a specimen cabinet along with coins of minor value. The only thing of significant value was a $1 Educational Note, so as a result the losses amounted to over $1000. I thought I had lost an Athenian Owl, but I had already secured it. Hugh Wood handled my claim quickly and without any undue red tape. They are the only reason I keep my ANA membership.
Great blog. It cool to get this much information in one spot. You spent some time putting all that together. Fun read. I'm going to read it again.
Thanks. I'm glad it's helpful. That all came with upgrading my own insurance to cover more from my American clients and shooting coins at shows.
Things may have changed, but I don't believe you need a dealer policy to cover shipments. I believe you just need to select that coverage. My dealer policy does not cover shipments as I found their terms too restrictive for the cost. However, I knew a major collector who had an individual policy with shipping coverage. One thing I noticed is that they seem to quote one carrier all the time. Last year when I pushed back at a rate increase, they came back with a quote from another carrier and it was significantly cheaper. And surprisingly it went down again this year at renewal.
Hugh Wood gold coverage for me is $451 a year. Can be more depending on how much your collection is worth. This covers shipping of up to $50,000 per shipment. The only rule is that it has to be shipped by USPS and registered mail. The thing about registered mail is that it is slow as swamp water, but it is very secure. Hey, for $38 a month, it's a safety net. Regards.
You might be right. My information came from me calling them back in November. I'll chat with them at the ANA show next week and report back. That plan might work for me. I'll check.
Time to renew my insurance again. With prices having run up so much these past few years it was necessary to spend significantly more time determining how much coverage I needed. This is not unlike what we all went through after real estate pricing jumped during and post COVID. The first time I heard of the absurd jump in prices homes were selling for we called the insurance company to sign up for an increase in coverage. It’s all too easy to forget to recalibrate before renewing, and to end up underinsured as a result. Needless to say, the total value of the inventory had climbed to a level not previously accounted for, and I got sticker shock when my quote came in. In order to keep the premium reasonable, I moved one of my safe deposit boxes at my current bank to another bank to spread my risk. Dealing with the additional inconvenience of storing stock in two different banks was another issue. How to manage that? I’ve cut back substantially on the amount of gold I bring to shows, preferring to sell that online, rather than in person. Therefore, I am dividing the inventory so that the gold resides at one while the non-gold goes to the other. Since I’m already bringing so little gold to the shows this seems the most logical division of inventory. It’ll be interesting to see how this works out. Have you recently reassessed the value of your coins to make sure you are adequately insured? If not, you might want to take the time . . .
I might be misunderstanding this part of your post, but you are not insuring the possible selling value of your home. You are insuring the cost to rebuild it if there's a total loss, not how much it would cost to purchase a comparable home. Building costs have gone way up, and insurance companies have also had a lot of major loss events over the past few years, which they recoup by charging everyone more.
Agreed, but the increase in home prices was a by product of a couple of temporary influences . . . (1) the broken supply chain for building materials, and (2) the sudden influx of immigrants which drove the cost of rentals and the ensuing desire of renters to buy first time homes. While those influences have since abated, there is the expected lag in price correction. Once it corrects I will again consider whether we have more coverage for our home than needed.
I don't know about immigration patterns, but I still see an awful lot of houses around here being bought by people who never set foot in them, just hold them as a speculation and rent them either long-term or VRBO/AirBnB. Again, there's an ever-smaller group of people who can afford ever-larger collections of property, and an ever-larger group of people who'll never be able to afford even one. I don't see that changing under current policy trends.
I have insurance on a portion of my coin collection which is located within a safety deposit box, and like many here in similar situations have to recalculate the replacement cost, which got me to thinking: There is a clause in the coverage contract that basically states that any “unexplained disappearance” will not be covered. This is concerning because insurance companies are continually looking for excuses to not pay out for insured losses, and what if a bank employee has proficiency in lock picking and the theft is not discovered on a timely basis and there is no evidence of that theft other than me saying several (all) of my coins are missing?
Again, the cost of buying or renting a home has nothing to do with the cost of insuring it, other than the insurer's cost should you have to rent while the property is being repaired or replaced. And the influence of immigration is not what you think it is. 34% of the construction workforce is immigrants, and in the west and south it's 40%. Imagine what the repair or replacement cost would be without that labor. https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/role-recent-immigrant-surge-housing-costs
You need to insure your Home to 80% of the Replacement Cost of the building at the time of loss to be paid Replacement Cost. That can get way deficient 16 mo after a renewal cycle. Especially if you’re low to start. Losses are paid at Actual Cash Value, less Depreciation & deductible. You don’t want to paid on that basis believe me Insurance agents would love to talk to their clients about insurance to value. It’s who we are, it’s what we do
