How much cover
Regardless of whether you are buying buildings and contents insurance separately or together, you should make sure that both elements are sufficient to meet your needs.

Buildings insurance is the easier of the two to determine. Basically, this must provide a sum assured that is enough to pay for the rebuilding of your home. If you are buying a new home and have a survey done, this figure will usually be indicated in the survey or valuation. If you are unsure whether this is accurate, check with the builder. If a lot of time has passed since you last determined the rebuild cost or you have made significant alterations to the property (such as a loft conversion or an extension), you should ask a reliable builder to estimate the rebuild cost again.

Almost all contents insurance policies also put a limit on the overall amount that you can claim, usually referred to as the sum assured. For mainstream insurance policies, this is often set at around the £30,000 mark. Many insurers are fairly inflexible in that they have a range of standard policies with a set sum assured and do not offer many options to customise the policy any further.

To decide what your minimum sum assured should be, make an inventory checklist of absolutely everything you can think of that you have in and around your home. Then calculate how much it would cost to replace each of the items. This should include things that you have made or built, been given or bought, as they would all need to be replaced if they were stolen or damaged. You should also try to include an approximate date on which the item was purchased and gather together any receipts you may have. Making this list is an incredibly tedious thing to do, as you will have to slowly go through every room in the house, listing every item and then attributing a replacement value to it. It is worth taking the time to do this properly though, as you will probably be surprised at how high the eventual total is.

Some insurers also put a limit on the amount you can claim for individual items. You should look out for this in policy details, where it will usually be called the Single Item Limit. It may be a lower value than some of your possessions. Where this is the case, you have three options:

• Negotiate for the full value to be included in the policy.
• Insure the item entirely separately.
• Break the item down into component parts of lower value. Cameras can have the lenses, main body and peripheral equipment insured separately, for instance.

The cost of buildings and contents insurance does not stay static year on year. The buildings insurance element is often index linked, which means that premiums rise in line with the retail price index (RPI). Social trends can also affect premiums; several years of high aggregate national claims levels can result in higher general levels of premiums. This can result from widespread increases in crime, or a series of natural disasters, both of which will lead to lots of insurance payouts.