The Importance of Self Storage Insurance
If you are moving or relocating, you may well find yourself in the market for a short-term storage unit. There are a number of reasons as to why you might need to rent a unit:
- If your house sale and purchase don’t tie together neatly, there could well be an overlap period, which sees you effectively homeless. Whilst they’ll always be friends or family to help you out in these situations, they probably won’t be able to accommodate you and your belongings. Storage is the best option for keeping your furniture neatly tucked away until you can book house removals to move into your new home.
- If you are relocating abroad, you might be moving ahead of your furniture. Often, you’ll travel by plane with a few suitcases, whilst the bulk of your belongings follow on behind on a more sedate journey by ship.
- If you are temporarily moving to a smaller property for work or financial reasons, it can make sense to hire a storage unit to keep some of your bigger furniture safe until your house removals move you back to a bigger place.
- If you decide to let out a room in your property for some extra income, you might need to free up space and put the furniture into temporary storage.
With all of these scenarios, you need to remember to think about self-storage insurance. You might assume that your belongings will be covered by the storage company. But, in actual fact, you usually need to purchase a separate insurance policy, which will be in addition to your monthly storage costs. Storage units are generally fairly safe places to store your belongings but they’re by no means impenetrable. Just consider the amount of people coming and going in any one day. It would be impossible for staff to constantly monitor activity in every area of the storage facility – some cover acres and acres of space.
If someone wanted to break into your unit, it would be fairly straightforward and there would be plenty of opportunity for a well-prepared thief. For peace of mind, self-storage insurance should be firmly on your list of priorities when booking your spot in the storage unit. You can either choose to take out the insurance offered by the company, or you can do your own research and choose an independent insurer that specialised in self-storage insurance. Whatever you do, take out the policy on the same day that you deposit your belongings to ensure you’re covered from the beginning.
Self-storage is an easy and convenient way to keep your furniture and other belongings neatly tucked away for anything from a few months to a few years and your unit is generally accessible to you 24 hours a day so you remove and replace boxes whenever you need to. However, to keep everything safe and secure, take out good insurance and never keep anything in your storage unit.
