A Lesson for Home Based Businesses
One thing that we have noticed since moving to Hervey Bay is the number of home based businesses there are around town. In our street alone there are are least three and that’s not counting the plumber or the builder.
Running a business from home certainly has it’s advantages and more and more people are doing it. However, running a business from home is still relatively uncommon and some companies that provide services that home based businesses use are still not attuned to the special needs of small businesses that operate from home.
Insurance is one of those industries as we learnt this week. Now we accept that in this situation the problem was ours. We did not take the time to check thoroughly to see if our contents policy really did cover all the contents and it didn’t.
But at the same time the consultant who handled our policy when we first signed up did not explain that some contents may not be covered at all. And this is how we found out.
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.
