Is Sports Equipment Covered on Your Homeowners Insurance?

Do you have a nice set of golf clubs? How about tennis racquets? Or does your son or daughter play hockey as a mite, pee wee, or midget? Do you enjoy fishing? If so, we’ll bet you spend a good amount of money on your sport here in the Utica area.

For example, we randomly looked up the pricing for golf clubs. A Titleist 917D2 driver is $550. Fairway woods are $350 each. And AP2 irons are $185 each. So a full set of Titleists with one driver, two fairway woods, and 9 irons would cost $2,565! And this doesn’t include the bag and balls.

Hockey equipment includes skates, sticks, protective gear and the bag to carry it all in. And that’s expensive. You get the picture.

The question is, are yours or your kids’ sports equipment covered on your homeowners insurance policy?

For example, what if your clubs are destroyed in a fire at home…or at the golf club if they’re stored there. What if they’re stolen during your week of golf at Myrtle Beach?

Or, most embarrassing, is that $550 driver covered if you just sliced it out of bounds for the third time in the round and you take a knee to the shaft, breaking it in two?

Or your daughter leaves her hockey equipment in the locker room at the rink to get a hot chocolate and it’s stolen.

Let’s Look at Your Home Insurance Policy’s Treatment of Sports Equipment

Your homeowners insurance policy covers your dwelling and its contents. (Renters insurance covers contents only.) So your sports equipment would be included in your contents coverage as Coverage C – Personal Property. Let’s look at that section of the policy and see what we find.

The first thing we see is that your insurance policy covers “…personal property owned or used by any Insured while it is anywhere in the world.” Wow, that sound good. So to answer the question above about golf clubs stolen in Myrtle Beach, the answer appears to be yes, there is coverage.

But wait, we head over to Special Limits of Liability. Are there limitations to the coverage of our sports equipment? We look down the list and do not find sports equipment listed. So we see there are no limitations like there are for silver, guns, and watercraft.

Then we look under Property Not Covered. Do we get tripped up here? Nope, sports equipment isn’t in the list, so on we go. It looks like so far, we’ve hit a home run.

The last place to be concerned is what kinds of losses the home insurance policy covers. Well, since we’ve determined that there are no restrictions, limitations, or exclusions for sports equipment, then all the perils that cover your other stuff also cover sports equipment.

So, if your daughter’s hockey equipment is stolen from the locker room, it’s covered. If all of your sports equipment, golf, tennis, and hockey burn in a house fire, it’s all covered.

A few things to remember: all losses are subject to your deductible. And personal property losses are subject to coverage for only listed perils. In addition, claim payments to your personal property are settled on a depreciated basis. However, you can get replacement cost contents on your homeowners policy for a small additional premium. Plus, many of our homeowners insurance carriers offer all-risk coverage to contents.

So our recommendation is that if you have expensive sports equipment, call us to be sure of your deductible and all of your coverages. Of course, if we don’t have your insurance now, just give us a call and we’ll offer you a second opinion on your current policies.

Oh, yeah, what about breaking your $550 driver over your knee? Sorry, even an all risk floater on your golf clubs would probably deny the claim because you intended to destroy the club. However, if you’re slicing it out of bounds all the time, the darn thing wasn’t any good anyways!

Fore!

Until next time,
Your SZW Team

SZW Insurance is your Utica area Trusted Choice™ independent insurance agent. Call us for a quote on insurance for your home, car, business, or life at 315.792.0000. Or request a quote here.