Collection Insured?

[Brick_Obession]

To those of you who have a substantial amount of Star Wars Lego (or if you collect something else Lego related), I am wondering if you have it insured or thought about having it insured.

I have tried a couple times now with no luck (up here in Canada). I am hoping that someone has been down this road and might be able to share some helpful tips.

Thanks for any help.

[MisterFubar]

I have a fairly high personal belongings policy that includes replacement cost on my Homeowners insurance and my collection is pretty well documented so I haven't bothered getting my LEGO it's own policy.

If I were to lose my home to a fire or tornado or have it burglarized my LEGO collection would be towards the bottom of my list of concerns.

I'm sure you can find a company that will let you take a Valuable Personal Property policy out on your LEGO collection, but I've never tried. I have 2 such policies on an individual piece of jewelry, and one a collection of firearms.

[WillyWampa]

I'm in Canada as well and discussed this with my insurance broker a couple of years ago. They were pretty useless for the most part and the only advice they gave was to simply increase the coverage on the home insurance policy to cover the extra value of the contents. The biggest challenge is getting a fair appraisal of the value of the collection as there are so many variables to a Lego collection and very few people that could give a true value on it. Ebay and bricklink are the only real sources of market information and comparable items can have greatly varying prices on them.

At the very least keep a detailed record of what is in your collection and the realative quality of each set (ie MISB, open but mint, good used condition etc)

[Rook]

Yep somewhere floating around here there's a thread about it. Basically you have three options.

1. Just assume that you'll be about replace you collection with the insurance you have.
2. Get a rider that covers you for the cost of replacing a specific dollar amount. Which is easy, and what I did.
3. Get a rider that covers you for "collectors value of the collection with replacement of collection". This basically means you have to document every set and possibly get it appraised. Because if lose a UCS MF, UCS SD, UCS Y-Wing: they give you the money to replace those items at their current cost.

I went with option 2. I simply input all my purchases into Brickset. Brickset was missing info for some sets, I did some basic math to get the average cost of set at time of purchase and then get the collection ensured for that amount.

So just as an example:

Option 1 would give you $30,000 to pay for all your personal items in the house including major appliances.
(Note personally this is good for people with collections from $5,000 to $10,000.)

Option 2 will give you say $25,000 on top of your $30,000 for everything else, however the $25,000 has to be used with 12 months to purchase only Lego. And you'll pay $5-15 more per month (Or more, or less, depending on size of collection.)

Option 3 will give you a blank check to replace the set by set cost of your collection but it will cost you $15-30 per month (and of course this would vary based on size of collection).

And PS: Yes I live in Ontario and I use State Farm Canada.

[lowlead]

As stated above, insuring LEGO is tricky, but having something is certainly better than no coverage at all.

I explored the options with my former insurance company, Travelers, and my current. I ended up with a $10,000 rider policy above and beyond my home owner's policy. In the States it's often called an 'Inland Marine' policy for some odd, historic reason.

I maintain a spreadsheet using the Numbers program, precisely documenting my collection as required by the policy. So, in the event of a total loss, I would have available a $10,000 'bank' to draw from as I attempt to re-build my collection. Again, not the greatest policy, but very affordable and offers some peace of mind.

[jeffmace]

The topic was something I thought about for a while with my collection. I always wondered if an insurance company would even consider covering something like LEGO. I did some searching last night and found this post and it was pretty interesting http://www.brickpicker.com/index.php/bl ... collection

I also like that you can search for sets to get the current value of a set and see what sets are selling for. It may be something of value to show an insurance agent for a purpose like this.