Insurance for home-based businesses is often neglected. The majority of home-based business owners believe that since they have home insurance, their home-based business activities are also covered by the same insurance. This may be true to a certain extent, however, your home based business activities may perhaps void your home insurance as well. If you were to use the home for other activities, you must notify the insurer or else it may eventually invalidate your home insurance policy.
Contents Insurance
Most homeowners depend on their home insurance in cases of loss, theft or damages. However, if you were to own a home based business, you must consider getting contents insurance in addition to your home insurance. Consider all business equipment you use, indoors as well as outdoors.
General Liability Insurance
All home based business owners must have general liability insurance. Your home owner’s policy would include injuries for your family members; however such insurance would cover injuries to employees or clients on your premises. On the other hand, if you use any kind of vehicle for your home based business, it must be properly insured.
Professional Liability Insurance
This kind of insurance would protect you as well as the client. If a client makes a claim that he has suffered damages due to your products or services, this insurance would protect your personal belongings and pay for the damage according to the claim. In such a process, the client would also be sufficiently compensated against the damages incurred. There are several different kinds of professional liability insurances available these days. There is malpractice Home-Based Business insurance, errors or omissions insurance, business interruption insurance and operations coverage.
In order to select the best kind of insurance for your home-based business, assess the kind of work you do. Secondly, monitor the factors which could possibly hamper your activities without insurance. As a home-based business owner, if you were to entirely depend on your business for regular income, then you must buy disability insurance.
This kind of insurance would cover all forms of lost income if you were disabled or unfit to manage your business. When you do your research on insurance policies, you would come to know that these policies are pretty expensive. Therefore, it is highly important to analyse your needs and then choose the insurance that best suits your business.
There are many home-based business insurance policies out on the market, each of them different and with different inclusions and rules. If you are not comfortable with researching the policies, you may want to think about an insurance broker to help you find the right cover for you.
Insuring your home-based business is an issue many small businesses don’t think about until it is too late. Use the Easter fire as a message for your own business: double check your policies are current and effectively cover what your business needs and schedule in an annual check to ensure you are getting the best deal from your insurance.
Sourced from: GetSmarterAboutMoney
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