Even though the state of Maryland does not require homeowners to buy homeowner's insurance, your mortgage holder will make you buy it if you have a loan on your home. Just remember that your mortgage company may have the legal right to require you to buy and keep homeowner's insurance, but it does not have the right to tell you which insurance policy you must buy or which insurance company you must buy it from.
This means you can go online and compare policies and prices against each other until you find the best deal on homeowner's insurance in Maryland.
Before you go online and start filling out forms, you might want to know a few things that can help you get even lower rates.
First, your policy needs to be big enough to cover the true replacement cost of your home and its belongings in today's dollars, in case you have to rebuild everything from the ground up.
Talking to a local contractor or an experienced real estate agent is the only way to know for sure how much it would cost to replace your home. After that, you should get a policy that covers the full cost of replacing your home and its contents, but not the value of your land. Your house, not your land, needs to be fixed up.
Fire and theft are the two things that homeowners' insurance companies worry about the most. If you take care of these two things, you can lower your monthly premiums.
Start with your home's outside. Brush and weeds should be cleared back at least ten feet from any building on your property. Get rid of any trash.
Also, trim the bushes around your windows so that thieves can't hide while they do their dirty work. Put in lights with motion detectors.
All outside doors need to have deadbolts that work, and all outside windows, no matter what floor they are on, need to have locks that work.
Make sure that you have enough fire and smoke detectors on every floor of your home and that they are all installed correctly and working. Change the batteries twice a year. Many people do this when they set their clocks ahead or back an hour.
Your kitchen needs a fire extinguisher that works and is the right kind for a home kitchen.
Once you've made your home as safe from fire and theft as possible, it's time to go online and find a few of the many websites that let you quickly and easily compare homeowner policies and their prices from a wide range of insurance companies.
If you really want to find the cheapest homeowner's insurance online, you need to fill out the forms on at least two and preferably three different comparison sites. The reason is that each site only compares a few companies. By comparing multiple sites, you will end up comparing more companies and making sure that you really did get the cheapest online homeowner's insurance in all of Maryland.