The Most Important Feature Available on Almost all Home Insurance Policies (and why MOST never use it)

Can you imagine a feature on your insurance policy that could make or break you during any insurance claim, large or small?
Can you imagine a free tool that can significantly enhance your insurance policies usefulness?

When consumers ask me which is the most important feature of the typical HO3 or HO5 home insurance policy, many are expecting a long winded and carefully worded history of the Extended Rebuild Endorsement or other important homeowners endorsement such as Building Ordinance and Law... Some expecting me to go into my standard answer about the best home insurance policy being the one that covers you most where you need but at a fair value.

These are all correct features of typical home insurance policies. However when I think it over for a while there is one thing that does keep me up with many of my clients.

Guess What that Is?

Lets back up and talk about your duty as a homeowner. When you have a home and a home insurance policy, the insurer has certain duties, but so do you. As an example if you have a claim, you have a duty to notify the insurer. If not, how would they know about the claim? Another one of your duties is to pay your home insurance bill on time.

Guess What happens if you do not pay your home insurance bill? You guessed it, it gets cancelled.

This is why the most important feature of the modern homeowners policy is Auto Pay. Set it up and forget about it.
If you pay monthly set up monthly auto pay.
If you pay yearly set up annual auto pay.

When its automatic it becomes much more difficult to miss payment and hence there is a significantly lower chance that a claim could be denied for non payment.

One thing that I cannot quite figure out is why so many Americans fail to take advantage of this free feature. It is as if they think that they will not be keeping their home insurance for long. It is as if they do not like home insurance. However if you have a mortgage (and most do) you are required to keep a homeowners insurance policy in place. Its a long story what happens if you do not have one in place.

Some people counter that not having auto pay prevents them from paying for insurance because they may want to switch. But in general you can always switch and retroactively get at least some of your money back. (This is situation specific.)

To recap Autopay is typically a free feature of homeowners insurance policies. Since you have to have home insurance, why not use this free feature.