Month: June 2006

Tenants Insurance – Worth it?

A couple weeks ago I got my renewal letter from Wawanesa for our tenant’s insurance. It is awfully expensive: $516.00/year. I have the letter right here so I’ll summarize what that covers:

  • Rating information: tenants package broad form, commercial occupancy, metro A, frame, more than six apartments, within 300m of hydrant, within 13km of firehall, deductible $500 Section I, 0.5% inflation protection, replacement cost of contents section I Coverage C
  • Property coverages:
    • Property coverages: Personal Property $30,900 and additional living expense $6,180
  • Liability
    • Legal liability: $1 million each occurrence
    • Voluntary medical payments: $5,000 each person
  • Additional
    • Sewer backup/water damage
    • Replacement cost on contents

The $30,900 personal property is the minimum. I am pretty sure our personal belongings are worth less than that. We didn’t bother to insure extra items like jewellery because my parents said they have never had their jewellery insured because as they said, “they don’t have much jewellery, and they are always wearing their wedding/engagment rings.” If my wife starts taking her ring off for work or something, then maybe we will list it.

I bought tenant’s insurance in Waterloo, Ontario before and it was only about $150/year or so. But this is Vancouver, in an urban area and the other thing that I think made ours more expensive was the fact that it is in a “commercial occupancy” dwelling. Essentially, we have businesses below us, including a coffee shop and a Bikram yoga place (Bikram yoga has something to do with sitting in a sauna and sweating, so I guess the fire risk in a sauna would be high). My family was robbed while we were sleeping when I was younger. Our computer was stolen as well as a few other electronic items. We got covered for everything which was nice, not only that but we got replacement value for them so we were able to buy a brand new computer that was much better than the old one. Robbery is one of the main things I am worried about. Our building does not feel overly safe compared to some of the places I have seen in Yaletown or anywhere else for that matter. I guess fire would have to be the other. $500/year does seem like a lot, especially compared to what I used to pay in Ontario, but it is nice to have the peace of mind that if one day something very bad should happen that financially we will be ok.

Long Time No Write

It sure has been a long time since I have generated much activiy on this site. I basically stopped looking at other blogs in my blogroll at bloglines so much because it was such a time waster. Now I just look at a few selective blogs, mostly the Canadian ones. And let’s face it, most blogs are crap anyways. 😉 I started pruning off all sorts of blogs, any blog that made reference to Kiyosaki in a positive light, anything that talked about credit card balance transfer money-making schemes, any blogs obsessive about producing ad revenue (more so than they were about investing), or anything else that I felt wasn’t worth my time. I still have far too many blogs listed in my bloglines account though. I really should trim it down more.

So what have I been up to on the financial front? Not much, everything has been going really smoothly the past few months. I have not talked to my financial advisor in a LONG time. I am just pumping the cash into my RRSP and my wife’s RRSP every month and he is accumulating it until there is enough to buy something like an ETF. I honestly have not even checked the status of my portfolio in at least 2 months. I really do not care if it has gone up by 3% or gone down by 3% during that time. That’s the way I like it, just focused on the long term performance, not worrying at all about day-to-day market activity. On the personal finance front, my spending system is working great and I hope to describe it in detail some time soon.