So many of you have offered excellent advise when I’ve asked previous questions I’m sure that I can count on some of you with experience to offer on the question of insuring an interstate move. Our daughter will be the one moving. She is a single professional woman moving from IL to VA next month. (Side note – if her house in Rockford does not sell very soon she will own two houses. I know many of you who have lived with that pain.)

During the past 8 to 10 years Karen has accumulated quite a nice collection of original art works. We’ve been working with her to list everything and set replacement value on them. All but one were purchased at the Ann Arbor Art Fairs and we’ve shopped with her and met those artists. I’ve personally been in touch with three of the artists in the last few days and on the website of a pair of photographers so we’ve gathered good information.

The base insurance with the mover of $6 per pound comes nowhere close to adequately covering the value of her property. The art alone comes to nearly $60,000. She also has some nice furniture but only 3 antiques of special value.

An agent for a moving company is coming to her home this Saturday to give an estimate and possibly write a contract. (My husband will also be there to meet with the agent.)

Do you recommend extra insurance through the mover or through an independent company? Any particular companies to recommend?

Thanks for any advise you can offer.

She should call her household insurance carrier. If the art is "scheduled" it would be covered. She would need an appraisal for the insurance company to cover it as a scheduled item.

Kathy, ChatKat is right about the insurance. Most movers will not cover it and will frequently not even be willing to handle it if they learn something is very valuable. We have a couple of extra riders on our home owners' insurance policy for excessively valued items that are 'scheduled'. Your daughter may already have such coverage and if so that insurance which should be "all risk" will cover it during a move. Also, the last time we moved and found that the movers would not even handle the artwork in any event, we shipped all the artwork by UPS. They did have terms for shipping and insuring art. One piece was damaged. It was a limited production statue (not a one-of-a-kind piece, thank goodness). I located another one for sale and notified UPS. They bought it and delivered it to me and took away the damaged one. Good luck to you daughter. Selling a house and moving are stressful!
Debbie

Thanks, Cathy and Debbie. We've passed that information on to our daughter. She'll try to get in touch with her insurance agency today. She's out in San Diego at a medical convention but using Google yesterday I got the phone number for her agency and gave that to her.

Karen also spoke with her IL realtor yesterday and learned that one lady had made a second visit to see her house. That is a little encouraging.