There are a lot of complications that arise when you buy a second home — be it for vacation or as a rental property. Fortunately, you can combine two home insurance policies on a single plan. But you can't simply add a second home to the first insurance plan.
Here's what you need to know:
· Insurers will typically see a vacation home as exceptionally risky. This is because, for most of the year, that home is not going to be occupied. If something goes wrong — such as a break-in, a broken pipe or a small fire — there's not going to be anyone there to deal with it. So, as a rule, your vacation home is going to cost more to insure than your regular domicile.
· If you rent your second home out, that may offset the concern over an unoccupied home. But it brings a number of risks that you wouldn't be covering on a home that you were living in yourself. Again, the insurance needs of this second home will be very different than the needs of your primary home.
· If your second home is in another state, your insurance company might not even cover the area in the first place.
· A home built from the same blueprint with identical property inside will be subject to different hazards, even if the two homes are only a few miles apart. Flooding and fire risk can be dramatically different — even in different corners of the same neighborhood.
So, there's no way to simply plug a second home into an existing policy. Every home insurance plan is specifically designed around the home that it covers. However, it is easy to call your insurer and have both homes covered with a single monthly payment.
There's no way to cover two homes with the exact same policy. But you can consolidate two policies, so that you only have one bill to pay. This should make for easier bookkeeping.