Needles & Grooves

I’ve a proposal form to fill in for them and need to list any over a grand. We will see!

Why not just add a Rider to your rental/home policy? (He says like he’s bothered)

Because it’s quite vague as to how and whether a home insurance policy covers collections. Also the value of the collection added to the value of my crap takes me beyond the value of contents that most insurers are willing to cover on a contents only policy for an apartment.

Please keep me posted. My current rental insurance would only give me depreciated value for my collection if something happened, not what it's worth or cost to replace unless I had each record appraised and graded which would also require them being in a sealed case to preserve them and that grade. like wtf.

That sucks (re your current insurance) - I checked with mine a few years back and they said I had unlimited value and that as long as no individual item was over $2,000 I was good with not listing everything (TBF The Beatles Mono boxset is getting close). Of course, who knows how they'll deal with any kind of loss (although I figure Discogs has to be a help for that)

Mine have said similar but with an apartment my contents is limited to €75k and when you think of the various things you have to cover that gets tight (your kitchen for example is contents, not buildings).

Also when you dig a bit deeper into the policy booklet it becomes a bit ambiguous and it specifically excludes media collections from accidental damage, which is obviously fine for an individual record, less so for the whole collection if something bad happened that’s kinda your own fault.

Yep, I've checked and at least in Canada it seems like it's basically $2000 for a "collection" is covered everything else isn't. Unless you get it appraised and then it's like double the cost of my current monthly insurance just for the records. So it basically would triple my insurance.

Another thing I have run into is the insurance companies don't always cover your pressings like you would expect, even if you are able to get a rider on them. For example, they may look for the cheapest replacement. So they may only cover your replacement on standard black and not that limited color variant that you have.

So basically one way or the other, we get hosed. Sounds about right…

Someone pointed me in the direction of insurance companies that specialize in collectables. And you guessed it, not only do you need to get everything apprised, it's also expensive costing you 1 to 2 percent of your total collection value per month to insure. So if your collection is worth $50k, you could be paying $1,000 a month to insure your collection. Now that's what I call getting hosed.

Yep this is what I found. Not to mention paying someone to appraise every single record in your collection individually which would cost a fortune in and of itself. I was surprised that there wasn't a way to include it within home contents but they screw you by referring to it as a "collection" and then capping it at a crazy low value like $2000.

I mean, MOST people don’t have $50,000 of petroleum on shelves in their house.

My current insurance doesn't even classify them as a "collection". They would just look at MSRP, and give me a depreciated amount that is the fraction of the MSRP for each record. I'd be lucky if they gave me $100 to replace my entire 700+ record collection.

@Lee Newman According to discogs, the max value of my collection is currently $47,230.18. Last year I saw it as high as 55k.

My median is $67k. I have a fair more than 700 though.

This insurer seems to be a specialist in the area and they don’t want appraisals. They do want pics of the more valuable ones though. I’ll be interested to see what the price will be…

Yeah from what I've seen it's generally 1-2% per year. So I'd be looking at like $2000 a year coverage. No thanks

Your collection is worth $200,000? Fuck! I thought I was bad at cogs med €43k and max €72k!

No, $101,000 max. But 2% is... $2000. I went high.