Are you in good hands when it comes to your guns? Some insurance companies may want to drop you like a leper if you have guns after you bought your house or not cover you if you have them prior. Some will not mind as long as the amount can be covered by the amount in the basic homeowners insurance or may make you take a rider if you have a decent amount or valuable firearms.
If you are a member of the NRA, you already have coverage up to $2,500, but with the price of guns literally skyrocketing in the past few years, you may want to reconsider that replacement value for what you paid back then may not cover what you need to spend if you were to lose them. I was just checking one of my shotguns that I bought for $250 years ago and I was shocked to see that it now costs $340 and I have an extra barrel!
If your insurance company does not want to cover your guns or are asking way too much, you may want to check the NRA’s Endorsed Insurance Program that covers up to $1,000,000. I did a quick and dirty check for $10,000 worth of guns and came back with an annual fee of $125 which is about 10 boxes of 9mm Winchester White Box from WallyWorld. Not bad if you ask me.
UPDATE: Pull out your bills of sale and compare what you paid for your gun with actual prices. You are gonna find yourself quite surprised. All the guns in my measly collection have gone up in value, in some cases 30% or more.
Respectfully, I suggest some other approaches to risk management in the typical home that owns $500-$10,000 in firearms:
1. NRA membership is only $35. So it may actually be wiser to enroll another family member in the NRA and get the additional $2500 NRA insurance (depending on the exact terms of the policy). Enroll a spouse and child in the NRA (a good thing in and of itself), and you’re already at $7500 coverage for the three people, at a cost of only $105. Depending on the terms of the policy this may or may not work, and may require that you formally sell or give certain guns to each family member. You might also be able to enroll an entity in the NRA, and transfer items to the entity. A trust under Florida law is free to create, but again, one would need to read the policy and make sure there are no catches.
2. I believe a better investment is a decent safe and alarm system. The odds of a risk incident occurring (i.e. burglary, fire, flood) are low, and even lower that one of those events will defeat the safe. That is not to say I don’t know of people that have had their safe defeated, but it is very rare. I would not say that such insurance is a bad investment for someone who is risk averse, and absolutely must replace the entire collection immediately. But for many folks, they will come out ahead financially with a safe and alarm system (your homeowners insurance will likely give you a discount as well), and figure worst case scenario, the money they saved over the years in premium will replace a few of the guns over the NRA insurance.
I would also be extremely careful about such policies because I am not sure who regulates them, what the deductible is, etc. How is the loss appraised? Do you know of folks who have made claims, and what were their experiences? I would not assume that just because the NRA “endorses” the product that it is actually any good.
All good points, specially the safe. People, heed the advice.
Hey now, no fair! You blogged about it before I could. 🙂
No worries though, I’m not exactly fast about putting stuff out there.
I can’t come up with something substantial to blog every day… I get it where I can !:)
Not really bothered, and it’s not like I won’t put something out there.
[…] Miguel on the NRA insurance program. I actually have a rider on my homeowner’s policy that comes in at about $100 a year. […]
I agree with a lot of things. I still think owning a gun for self protection is a good thing in most of the cases. I also think that people who own guns or are looking into getting one, should get it insured. There are a lot of reasons for it. First, in case your gun gets stolen and ends up in a wrong hands, insurance will protect you from damages. Also, in case of accident, you wont have to cover the costs of damage yourself. We actually wrote similar sort of article that can be found here: http://nationalcarryacademy.com/guns-protect-now-protect-gun-insurance/ Maybe someone will find it useful. Would definitely appreciate the feedback. Anyways, thank you for great insights and I am looking forward for more content.
– Robert M