Two recent events have caused me to look more closely at my home contents insurance: The terrible bushfires now destroying a huge part of Victoria, and the fact that my insurance is actually due to be paid.

Looking at the value, I thought it looked decidedly low for the amount of crap I had.   I got on my insurer’s site and went through their semi-automated estimato-tron in order to work out how much cash I’d need to replace my shit if under some bizzarre circumstances the bushfires spread to inner-city Melbourne.

Firstly, I’m under-insured.  This is not a surprise and it’s probably a good idea that my apartment didn’t get destroyed in the last year as I’d be seriously out of pocket.  Secondly, I was quite shocked at one of the few caveats in my insurance:

CDs, DVDs, tapes, records, game cartridges and discs were only covered up to $2,500 under general insurance.  If I wanted total coverage, they’d have to be listed individually.

Now, as someone with an arseload of games and games consoles, this poses a bit of a quandary.  I’m assuming that games consoles fall under this category as well, as there were no sections for replacement estimation in their form.  If that’s the case, should I be individually listing my XBox 360, Wii and PS3?  Those three would take up a large chunk of the $2,500.

Then we get into the retro stuff.  What about my Virtual Boy and Neo Geo CD?  Should I list my boxed Vectrex?  Some of the stuff I had is worth a few hundred dollars, and the likelyhood is that even if everything else can be replaced with new stuff, if I want to protect my games and consoles I’d have to individually list each and every single one of them or have a separate policy.

This seems to be a common thing across all collections, not only gaming collections.  The page specifically lists coins, curios and other collectables at values lower than the max given for the entertainment goods.  I wonder how other people have dealt with this..