€5–11/mo

rented flat, €20,000 of contents

€11–19/mo

owned two-room flat, 60 m²

€28–47/mo

detached house, 130 m²

−22 %

switching comprehensive cover to a narrower one

Three kinds of home, three different policies

Home insurance is not one product but three different packages depending on what you own. When renting you insure only the contents: furniture, electronics, clothes, the bike. The building and its structures are the landlord’s and the housing company’s responsibility.

In an owned flat or terraced house you insure the contents plus the surfaces of the flat and your own liability towards the housing company. The company insures the building, and you pay for that through the maintenance charge. In a detached house you insure everything yourself, including the building at rebuild value – and that is where the price gap comes from.

These figures are estimates from typical market prices. Home insurance is not required by law, but a landlord may require it: a SATO tenant, for example, commits in the tenancy agreement to keeping home insurance in force for the whole tenancy.

Two choices that move the price

In practice you negotiate the price of home insurance with two dials: the breadth of cover and the deductible. The other factors – floor area, contents value, location – are given.

Raising the deductible from three hundred to five hundred saves €10–18 a year in the calculator’s model. That is a poor trade if a claim ever happens: you spend 11–19 years saving exactly what you pay out in one incident. Narrowing the cover saves more, but it removes, for example, cover for an item breaking suddenly, which usually comes only with comprehensive cover.

Value your contents at replacement-new prices

If your policy has a sum insured for contents, it should match what the contents of your home would cost new. The figure feels large until you count it: beds, sofa, dining table, kitchen appliances, computers, phones, clothes, tools, sports gear, the pram and the contents of the bookshelves.

Under-insurance means a payout is cut in the same proportion by which the sum insured falls short of the real value – so in a large claim you receive only part of what you expected.

• ·Walk through the rooms and count replacement-new prices, not current second-hand value.
• ·Photograph or film the whole home and keep the files in cloud storage – making an inventory from memory after a loss is miserable work.
• ·Expensive single items such as instruments, cameras or jewellery often need a separate entry in the policy.
• ·Bicycles are covered only up to a limited amount at many insurers unless separately insured.
• ·Employer-owned equipment used for remote work is usually not covered by your home policy.

Where the housing company’s responsibility ends and yours begins

The most common loss in a Finnish block of flats is a water leak, and there the line runs between structures and surfaces. The housing company is responsible for the structures and basic systems such as the pipes: it fixes the leak and repairs the damaged interior of the flat to the company’s basic standard at the time of the repair (Limited Liability Housing Companies Act, chapter 4, section 2). Everything above that – your own renovations, a higher standard of finish, and the contents – is your policy’s business.

In practice that means a bathroom you had renovated yourself and the kitchen fittings are worth declaring to your own insurer. If they exceed the company’s basic standard, the difference falls to you. Both sides also carry their own deductible, so a single incident can produce two of them – one via the housing company through the maintenance charge and one from your own policy.

Liability and legal expenses come along with it

Home insurance normally includes liability cover, which pays for damage you cause to others – the neighbour’s bathroom, say, when your washing machine leaks. In practice this is the part that can cost the most, and it is why home insurance is worth having even as a renter.

Legal expenses cover is usually included too, paying lawyer’s fees in disputes. Both normally extend to the whole household rather than just the policyholder. Neither shows separately in the price, but together they are why a renter’s five-euro policy is such an unusually good deal.