Should You Call Your Home Insurance or the Other Person's After a Theft?
Call your own insurer. Theft isn't like a car accident, so there's no other person's policy to file with.
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There is no other policy to call
A theft is not a liability situation, so there is no at-fault party's insurance to involve. Your own homeowners policy covers your stolen belongings under personal property coverage, whether the theft happened inside your house, out of your car, or while you were traveling. That coverage usually applies anywhere in the world, not just at home, though your policy sets the exact terms. Before you file, check your declarations page for your personal property limit and for any sub-limits on categories like jewelry, cash, or electronics, since those are often much lower than your overall coverage. File a police report first, since insurers generally ask for one with a theft claim. Then gather receipts, photos, or appraisals for what was taken, because proving ownership and value is what decides how much you get paid.
Check what your limit actually covers
Jewelry, electronics, and cash often carry sub-limits far below your overall personal property coverage. If those caps are too low for what you own, it's worth seeing what other policies offer.
What proving ownership actually looks like
You don't need a receipt for every item you owned, but you need enough to support the value you're claiming. Credit card statements, old photos that happen to show the item in the background, warranty cards, manuals, or a gift receipt someone else kept all help. If you have a home inventory, even a casual one like a video walkthrough of your rooms, pull it out now. Insurers process theft claims faster when the list is specific. Name the brand, the model, roughly when you bought it, and its condition, rather than writing something general like 'electronics' or 'clothes.'
For jewelry, cash, firearms, art, and collectibles, the sub-limits on a standard policy are usually a few thousand dollars total, no matter what your overall personal property coverage is. If you own an engagement ring worth more than that on its own, the policy likely won't pay its full value after a theft unless you've done something about it beforehand. That something is called scheduling the item, also known as a rider or endorsement. It means listing the item separately with its own appraised value, usually for an added premium, and in exchange the sub-limit no longer applies to it.
Scheduling matters most for things that are easy to carry off and hard to replace at any price, like family jewelry, watches, or musical instruments. An appraisal done now, before anything happens, is what makes a future claim on that item go smoothly. Without one, you're left trying to reconstruct the value of something that's already gone, which insurers are naturally more skeptical of. If you travel with valuables often, scheduling also tends to remove location restrictions that might otherwise limit coverage to theft at home.
Cash is its own problem. Most policies cap cash coverage at a few hundred dollars, and there's usually no way to schedule your way around that the way you can with physical items. If a theft included a safe full of cash, don't expect personal property coverage to make that whole. Checks, cards, and electronic funds are different from physical currency in how a policy treats them, so it's worth reading that part of your declarations page closely rather than assuming cash and valuables are covered the same way.
How the claim payout actually gets calculated
Once an insurer has your police report and your list of stolen items, the payout depends on what kind of personal property coverage your policy carries. Most policies pay one of two ways. Actual cash value pays what the item was worth at the time it was stolen, factoring in age and wear. Replacement cost pays what it would take to buy the same or a similar item new, today. Your declarations page says which one your policy uses, and the difference can be substantial on anything a few years old.
A five-year-old laptop is a good example. Under actual cash value, the insurer pays what that laptop was worth used, which could be a fraction of what you paid for it. Under replacement cost, the insurer pays what a comparable new laptop costs now. Replacement cost policies usually work in two steps. The insurer pays the actual cash value first, then pays the remaining amount once you've actually bought the replacement and shown the receipt. That second check doesn't come automatically, so hold onto proof of what you spend.
Your deductible applies here too. Whatever the payout comes to, your policy's deductible gets subtracted before the insurer cuts the check. If the stolen items add up to less than your deductible, filing a claim may not be worth it, since you would pay the loss yourself anyway and a claim can still affect your record with the insurer. Add up the value of what was taken before deciding whether to file.
Depreciation, the deduction for age and wear, applies item by item, not as a flat percentage across the whole claim. A stolen television from last year depreciates less than a ten-year-old one. If your estimate of depreciation looks off once you see the insurer's math, your adjuster can walk through how they got the number. Documentation of the item's age and condition is what supports pushing back on it.
Before you file
Pull up your declarations page and check your personal property limit, your jewelry and cash sub-limits, and whether your coverage is actual cash value or replacement cost. That's what decides how much a claim actually pays.
