You’ve spent years filling your home with a dream collection, but a freak flood, wildfire or hurricane could destroy it in an instant, leaving you to rely on your home insurance for assistance.

The trouble is, a standard policy might not provide the help or compensation you’d expect. As recent hurricanes Milton and Helene showed, weather catastrophes can strike in unexpected areas and cause far more damage than anticipated, leaving collectors without a plan and, potentially, inadequate insurance coverage.

“We’re seeing an increase in flooding, named and convective storms with more wind and water damage than ever before. So many underwriters are becoming more broad brushing in their policy exclusions,” said Adrienne Reid, senior vice president of fine art insurance at Huntington T. Block Insurance Agency.

Whether it’s paintings, antiques, jewelry, vintage wines, comic books or some other precious collectible, odds are you’ve taken steps to ensure your valuables are stored properly to limit theft. But protecting it from extreme weather calls for additional measures, including expanding your insurance coverage, modifying your home and creating a detailed emergency care plan.

 

Personalize Your Home Insurance

Relying on your home insurance to protect your possessions as part of your policy’s personal property coverage comes with significant limitations—even if you buy a high-value policy. Most home insurance caps how much they’ll reimburse you for certain kinds of damaged or destroyed items, meaning you likely won’t get coverage for the full value of your collection. For instance, your policy may have $500,000 in belongings or personal property coverage, but limits jewelry coverage at $10,000.

Standard home insurance policies also fail to cover many common dangers, like flooding, earthquakes, landslides, pests and mold, meaning if your collection suffers from an event not covered, you can’t make a claim.

Collectors can add an insurance rider to their policy to get around some of these limitations. Also known as an endorsement, amendment or scheduling an item, a rider allows you to customize your policy by including specific items within your contract and expanding the standard coverage available to ensure precious things inside your house are adequately protected.

While scheduled personal property coverage riders can increase the amount an insurance company pays out for an item, they cannot change the situations in which you are covered. For that, you’ll need to buy separate flood or earthquake insurance or add another rider for threats like water damage from a backed-up drain.

 

Add Specialist Insurance 

Collectors wanting the broadest possible protection should consider a separate fine art, jewelry or other specialist insurance policy.

“People tend to think you need a multimillion dollar collection in order to need a specialist insurance policy, but that’s a misconception. It’s more about the coverage you want than meeting a value threshold,” said Reid.

Most standalone insurance policies for collectibles are “all risk,” meaning unless an event or type of damage is specifically excluded in your agreement it is covered. While war, government seizure, nuclear events, pests and gradual deterioration are common exclusions, natural disasters are typically covered, unlike with homeowners insurance.

Insuring jewelry will cost between 1.5% to 2% of a collection’s total worth annually. Photo by Settlemania via Pexels

A stand-alone policy for fine art or other collectibles will also apply automatically to newly acquired items and cover artworks temporarily at galleries or museums, in transit, and that move between your properties.

“This provides clients with a great degree of flexibility, especially if they have vacation homes or secondary properties where they enjoy displaying their collection,” said Olivia Cinqmars-Viau, fine art underwriting manager and assistant vice president at Berkley Asset Protection.

To determine the value of your coverage, insurers will request an appraisal or recent bill of sale for the items in your collection. You can opt for a scheduled approach, where each collectible is listed individually and insured for a stated amount, or a blanket approach, where an overall policy limit covers the entire collection but there is usually no per-item maximum. Some policies will cover only up to the agreed-upon amount, but others will provide for market fluctuations by paying the current market value for a piece as long as it doesn’t exceed 150% of its original insured value.

When you make a claim, these policies include specialists who can assist you in finding a restorer. Some policies may even pay for the depreciation an item suffers once damaged or repaired.

 

Understand Coverage Costs

Many factors influence how much you’ll pay to insure your collection and whether an insurer will even provide coverage. Underwriters will want to know about the types of objects in your collection, including the materials they’re made of and their fragility; how the collection is stored; the security and safety features; and how vulnerable a location is to natural disasters, according to Cinqmars-Viau.

In some cases, insurers may even visit a property before extending coverage. Christiane Fischer, president of the fine art division at Tokio Marine Highland, recalled inspecting the home of a fine art insurance applicant who had a large collection worth over $100 million and lived on an island off Miami.

“We talked to him about what he did when a hurricane was approaching and what his plan for certain high-value items was,” said Fischer. “A person’s attitude about their collection is very important.”

“Underwriters holistically review the collection and collector looking for signals that the collector is doing due diligence with the collection,” added Reid. “At a bare minimum, we would expect someone to have a central station fire and burglar alarm before extending coverage.”

Insuring your collectibles or artwork through a home insurance rider will generally cost you about 0.8% of your collection’s total worth annually, according to Progressive. Jewelry collectors will be on the hook for slightly more, paying between 1.5% to 2%.

When you need to make a claim, policy riders typically charge no or very low deductibles, especially compared to the deductible you’ll face by going through your home insurance’s personal property coverage.

Specialist collectible insurance rarely has a deductible, but some policies will charge a low one depending on the type of items in your collection and the perils they could face. For instance, those in hurricane-prone areas usually have a deductible, Fischer said.

“People often think they cannot afford to insure their collection, but fine art and other specialist insurance is not very expensive,” Fischer said. “For a collection worth $1 million, you’d typically pay an annual premium between $1,500 and $5,000.”

 

Create an Emergency Plan

Keeping your collection safe during a hurricane or other natural disaster will require more than good insurance. Experts recommended having a detailed shelter-in-place plan and evacuation plan ready before any extreme weather threatens your collection.

Move any pieces you plan on leaving in your home to a dedicated space on an upper floor in a reinforced interior area with no windows, said Casey Santangelo, head of fine art and specie insurance in the Americas for global insurer AXA XL. Think about who is qualified to move these pieces to this safe room so they don’t suffer any handling damage, she added.

“Part of our proactive recommendations prior to insuring a collector in California’s collection was to get a fire-proof safe they could fit their most valuable objects into,” Reid said. “Unfortunately, during wildfire season, their entire house burned to the ground. Their safe was in bad shape, but all the works inside were fine.”

Hurricane-zone collectors will likely need to install metal storm shutters over windows. “Many people do not like these shutters, but we will typically not provide coverage unless they’re there and will ask for proof or certification from the installation company,” Fischer said.

Adding hurricane ties or straps to your roof and installing a wind-resistant garage door are also smart moves for collectors in hurricane-prone areas, Santangelo said. This garage protection can be especially important if you have outdoor art or other items that can be moved there for safekeeping.

Invest in backup generators to maintain control of the property’s temperature and climate if you lose power, helping to prevent mold or other issues. “Many collectors own backup generators but do not take steps to protect those generators,” Santangelo said. “They do not ensure they’re elevated outside of a storm surge or get a hurricane-rated enclosure for it.”

If you know adverse weather is coming, the safest option may be to remove your collection from your home and send it to a storage facility early on.

“We have some collectors in Florida, for instance, who, as soon as hurricane season starts, move their entire collection to a secure facility until the season is over,” Reid said.

You can set up a predetermined emergency evacuation agreement with many shippers and storage facilities in advance so that when a named storm or other threat is imminent, they will spring into action, ideally at least a week in advance.

“A last-minute evacuation is really challenging and puts the collection at risk,” Santangelo said. “Bad weather, wind and rain could have already started. The storage facility could be understaffed and not have the proper resources available to assist.”

Prepare Your Records

Should the worst occur, you’ll want to be able to swiftly claim the loss with your insurer. To do so, be ready with recent appraisal documents and a complete inventory of your items.

“Record keeping may be a boring task, but it is the most important,” Reid said. “Collectors need a solid inventory, whether it is housed on a cloud-based system collectors can subscribe to that helps them keep track or in a low-tech Excel spreadsheet.”

This inventory should be updated regularly to include new acquisitions and reflect the current market value of your items. A backup of it should be housed in a separate location off your property.

“The general recommendation is to have your collection appraised every three to five years,” Reid said, noting that that frequency may not be necessary depending on the type of collection and how susceptible it is to market-price fluctuations. “Any pieces you know or have been advised are more likely to experience value fluctuations should be reappraised more frequently.”