After water damaged her floor, Victoria resident Kayleigh Donahue returned to cold concrete, dust and exposed nails.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u201cThey came in and tore out all of the flooring and, because we didn\u2019t have renter\u2019s insurance, we couldn\u2019t live somewhere else during that time,\u201d Donahue said.<\/p>\n
On top of covering the replacement cost of renters\u2019 personal belongings and legal costs from lawsuits, tenant insurance also pays a portion of additional living expenses incurred during repairs.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomething that\u2019s not often thought about is where you go or what you do if your unit or another unit in the building is damaged and you can\u2019t live there for a period of time,\u201d said Pete Karageorgos, spokesman for the Insurance Bureau of Canada, a trade association that represents Canada\u2019s home, car and business insurers.<\/p>\n
According to Statistics Canada, less than half of the country\u2019s renters (42 per cent) have tenant insurance while 97 per cent of homeowners insure their homes.<\/p>\n
Pinning down exactly why so few tenants sign up for insurance is no easy task. Many renters fail to realize the full value of their personal belongings and some wrongly believe their stuff is covered by their landlord\u2019s insurance, Karageorgos said.<\/p>\n
Donahue\u2019s landlord didn\u2019t hold her liable for the water damage but also didn\u2019t bother replacing the floors for the three remaining months of her lease, leaving cold concrete, dust and exposed nails as part of the decor.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt made my life extremely difficult,\u201d she said. \u201cEspecially when I\u2019m in grad school and don\u2019t have a stable place to study. I always had to be out, I had to spend long hours at school because going home was a disaster.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carleton University economist Radovan Vadovi\u010d specializes in behavioural finance to better understand how people assess risk and make financial decisions. He suspects many people think the costs of tenant insurance outweigh the benefits.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe chances of a loss are very unclear. There is very little information out there on the frequency of accidental loss of personal property,\u201d Vadovi\u010d said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u201cWith car insurance, for instance, we have a much better idea. We regularly see or hear about traffic accidents. In face of this ambiguity, there is much wiggle room and it is easy to underestimate the chances.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Donahue, it was a second flood months later \u2014 this time from the kitchen sink of another apartment \u2014 that pushed her and her roommate to purchase tenant insurance.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt didn\u2019t cause damage to our suite but it caused damage to the suite below and it\u2019s still ongoing litigation,\u201d she said, without disclosing any details about legal costs.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs soon as we moved into the place that I\u2019m in now, we got renter\u2019s insurance.\u201d<\/p>\n
Karageorgos insists it\u2019s an affordable, worthwhile investment that \u201cprobably costs less in a month than daily coffee runs.\u201d Premiums typically range from $10 to $50 per month, depending on the value of the tenant\u2019s contents.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s important for people to sit down and actually look at what their situation is and whether they can afford not to have insurance if something does go wrong,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not having an exercise about economics here but about real lives.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An overflowing toilet forced Kayleigh Donahue and her roommate out of their rental condo last winter \u2014 and like most<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":167,"featured_media":4098,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[328],"tags":[331,330,332,329],"class_list":["post-4084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-personal-finance-2015","tag-insurance","tag-personal-finance","tag-renters","tag-tenant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/167"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4084"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4564,"href":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4084\/revisions\/4564"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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