One of the worst experiences my wife and I have ever gone through was being a victim of a home burglary. Just typing the word “burglary” seems to underwhelm the emotional turmoil we experienced after we lost all our stuff. To add insult to injury, we lacked renters insurance. This mistake cost us thousands of dollars, and was easily avoidable.
At the time this “incident” occurred, my wife and I were newly married and about to celebrate our first Christmas together. We were renting a small, cheap house in the somewhat sketchy part of town as I was a graduate student and my wife was a teacher.
About a week prior to Christmas, I went to work at the lab, and my wife went to her teaching gig as usual. I came home early for lunch to find the back door had been kicked in. I experienced a huge rush of adrenaline and called the cops. After they secured the house, I was allowed in to survey the disaster zone that was left.
In case you weren’t aware, most criminals aren’t the meticulous, glove wielding type often depicted in movies. They typically follow the “smash and grab” approach where they knock down a door, smash/ruin everything, and then take off with your most prized possessions as quickly as possible.
We lost our computers, tablets, my coin collection, money, etc.
The tragedy was that we didn’t have renters insurance, so there we were with no gear and no insurance money to replace what we had lost.
If you get one thing from this blog, I hope you use our story as motivation to purchase renters insurance.
I was ignorant of what people are capable of and never thought something like this could happen to us.
I also never knew how stupid-cheap renter’s insurance is. We now have renter’s insurance and pay a meager $8.00 per month for coverage on all of our stuff. In Millennial dollars that equates to about 1.5 Venti Vanilla Bean Frappuchinos from Starbucks.
Speaking of Millennials (of which demographic I belong), of this group, nearly 60% lack renter’s insurance!
While we’re throwing statistics out there, 37% of Millennials don’t have coverage because they don’t know how it works. 52% don’t have renter’s insurance because they wrongly believe their landlord’s insurance will cover their stuff.
With that being said, you have no excuse to not have insurance. Stop what you’re doing now, and BUY RENTER’S INSURANCE! Just search for renter’s insurance on the interwebs, and get a quote. I don’t recommend a particular company, but we decided to go with GEICO.
Do you have renter’s insurance? Have you ever experienced a home break-in? Share your story in the comments below.
We had it when we moved down here into an apartment. Thankfully, we never needed it; but it’s so cheap, it’s ridiculous not to get it! Especially if you get it through the same company as your auto insurance, you’ll pay a few dollars a month. I think the most I’ve ever paid was around $12 a month.
It’s all about peace of mind.
Yes! It’s soooo cheap!
Yikes, yes that does sound awful. It’s interesting because back when I first started renting I got renters insurance almost as soon as I was done signing the lease. We never used it, but was still nice to have. Ironically, I did get burned because I was lacking a similar type of insurance. I didn’t get rental coverage on my car, and when I got into an accident and the car was gone at the shop for nearly a month, I had to pay nearly $1,000 out of pocket to cover a rental. You live and learn I guess!
Oh yeah! I’m glad we had this learning experience while we were relatively poor. A burglary now would be much more costly without insurance.