Cost of fire/earthquake insurance

[Gareth]

Our fire/earthquake insurance is up for renewal. Just interested in what others are paying.

We live in a rented wooden-framed house. We are required to get the insurance as part of our lease.

It’s 27,000 yen for two years for the standard and 32,500 for the higher level plan. We got the standard last time at 25,000.

Cheers

[Roger Van Zant]

I'm not a renter, but for my house, I pay about 60,000 per year.
This covers natural disasters, burglary, the usual sort of stuff.
The company I use is Sony Sonpo, I think.
Mine is up for renewal in April 2022, so I am going to shop around and try to get something at a lower price.

In your case, the difference in price isn't that much between the two.
I would get the higher-priced one. Peace of mind, possibly more money in the event of a disaster?

A friend of mine got 1.5 million yen after the Kumamoto earthquakes.
He didn't even have any damage to speak of, but the insurance agent who visited him just put the claim in anyways!

[RetireJapan]

Earthquake insurance can be very profitable. We got payouts for both the medium-sized earthquakes in Sendai this year, neither of which did much damage. The payouts seem to be based on fulfilling set conditions rather than actual damage, and the assessors are surprisingly lenient.

[TJKansai]

Maybe I just missed out.
We had a guy come by and he asked if we had fire and typhoon insurance. I said just fire, but he seemed to think it was likely we had typhoon included. He wanted to send a crew up to the roof to check for damage, but I said no thanks, sensing a scam (plus our roof is less than a year old).

I do know I guy whose balcony dropped off his house. He got a payout based on a quake (I believe) that occurred over a decade ago.

[RetireJapan]

Maybe I just missed out.
We had a guy come by and he asked if we had fire and typhoon insurance. I said just fire, but he seemed to think it was likely we had typhoon included. He wanted to send a crew up to the roof to check for damage, but I said no thanks, sensing a scam (plus our roof is less than a year old).

I do know I guy whose balcony dropped off his house. He got a payout based on a quake (I believe) that occurred over a decade ago.

That sounds like a scam/predatory company. There were a few news stories about that kind of thing: companies rock up, 'find' some damage, offer to do all the insurance paperwork for you and promise it will cover the cost of the work, then when it's finished tell you that actually the insurance isn't going to pay out and you owe them x amount for the job.

For insurance claims always call the insurance company yourself: they will send you forms to make a claim and either just pay or send someone to check the damage before approving that claim. You will get the cash and can then choose to spend it on repairs or not. Either way there is no need to involve a third party, particularly one that comes round cold calling