Small Business and Home Based Business Insurance
Here is a sad tale of insurance coverage that wasn’t and an important lesson that we learned this week.
These days laptops come equipped with internal wi-fi cards but as recently as a couple of years ago, when we bought our latest laptop, wi-fi was new technology and internal cards were yet to be thought of.
When we moved to wi-fi for our home based business we bought a wi-fi network card for this laptop that plugs into a port on the side of the machine and over the last 12 months it has worked very well.
At the same time we have had all our equipment included in our household insurance. Our insurance company was quite happy to include our computers because we could legitimately say that every one of them was used, in very small part, for private use.
As far as the insurance company was concerned it didn’t really matter how much they were used for private use and their only criteria for establishing that it was for private use was if there were games installed on the computers and - being computer geeks - of course there were.
So that was the situation on Monday morning … when I dropped the laptop and of course it fell on the side where the wireless card was plugged in. After the fall the wireless card was pushed much further in than it normally goes.
I powered up the laptop and it worked, I tried to access the network and it didn’t work - time to call the insurance company.
The bad news was that our insurance company (RACQ - a very reputable company here in Queensland) does not cover anything for accidental damage if the policy is for goods situated in a house that is leased - we lease.
The company does not cover laptops for accidental damage, even if they are listed as a specified item, if they are used for business.
The moral of the story is - check your insurance policies item by item because the cover you think you have may not really be there at all.
