Collection insurance

[bobw]

I've just received a renewal notice from my insurer for my home contents policy. This got me thinking about whether my collection is adequately insured and the answer was a resounding no! I spoke to a broker and they told me that to insure it for the full value would require a specialist insurer and that they would need a valuation; I don't know who would be qualified to value it, and more importantly - who the insurer would accept. They later came back to me and said they'd found someone who would insure it based on a full inventory and receipts. Who has receipts for every bug they've bought, and what about self-collected or exchanged ones? Also, with 10,000+ bugs in the collection, it would take me months to produce an inventory. For this they quoted me £450 for £70,000 worth of contents insurance plus £60,000 for the collection. Obviously, a lot of the collection is irreplaceable but I still want it insured, although I guess the only real risk is fire, and possibly vandalism.

What do other people on here do about insuring their collections? Any tips would be most welcome. From a personal point-of-view this is aimed mainly at UK members, but I'm sure such a topic would be useful for members in all countries.

Bob

[wollastoni]

Very good topic. It is also a question I ask to myself...

[timmsyrj]

I looked into it a few years ago Bob, like you I didn't have receipts and when I eventually found an insurer that would even consider it they insisted that they were stored in fire proof cabinets or I installed a sprinkler system in case of fire, never mind the cost of the fireproof cabinets the thought of having to reset everything that survived the fire with all the water pored on them.
The only answer is to be as vigilante as is possible, fire alarms and a couple of extinguishers (co2) type not water, powder or foam for if you are home, a good RCD electrical supply unit to prevent electrical fires and just remembering to turn off fires, cookers etc, this is the hard bit as we get older and the old grey matter starts to seize up.
As for vandalism or other types of damage keep them well locked up, windows shut etc

[suzuki]

Bob. I am lead to believe that Skoda car owners can get such insurance at a special rate.Karl.

[africaone]

1- you can propose a expert (recognised by the company) to estimate the collection. A way is to give a unit price for each spécimens and calculate for the all collection. Another way is to estimate the value of 10-15 % of the most rare things and to give the a global ammount for the rest. All the boxes need to be photographed. The way by the rare things is probably the best as in a collection it is the part with a real value (it is easier to cense them and give a value)
2- there are a kind of insurance (heared from a friend) for which you choose yourself the total ammount (the company give his rate for this kind of goods and you pay proportionally). I am not expert in insurance and it is probably different from a country to another.

The an insurance i took for the house, the company asked me which value must be "reserved" for the collection itself.

[bobw]

Thanks for your replies (except Karl). I was surprised more people weren't interested in contributing as it's something that affects everyone with a collection. I'm sure that a lot of us must have collections that are worth more than our cars, and we wouldn't contemplate not insuring them; I'm sure there must be a few that have collections worth more than their houses!

Bob

[Adam Cotton]

There was a thread on Taxacom e-mail list today asking about insurance for herbarium specimens. There was a reply from Landcare Research, NZ stating "We calculated it based on the time and travel it would take to recollect all the specimens (i.e. replacement cost), this has little meaning for the types of course, but it is somewhere to start. You can imagine that for a collection of over 100,000 specimens this is a large amount of money."

Adam.

[smallcopper]

Bumping this thread, as it's something that's only now occurred to me, and the more I think about it, the more concerned I am. (My original post on another thread at the end of this post, for completeness sake).

Like Bob, I've plenty of aberrant specimens that are, if not irreplaceable, then extremely hard to find duplicates of. A few I have been fortunate enough to catch or breed myself, but others have been cash purchases down the years. One or two are known type specimens of the aberrations in question, and I shudder to think of the emotional pain alone their loss would entail. But I digress. My collection's worth I've never tried to calculate in terms of pounds and pence, but I suppose it's pretty substantial when it comes to replacement, where that would be possible. And then there are the books, and the shells...

I don't have anything else valuable that's uninsured, apart from my collections, so it seems like something of an oversight on my part.

I'd appreciate any advice, especially from UK-based forum members, of how (or indeed, if) they've dealt with this, and if possible specific recommendations of insurance companies.

Jon


Original post:
(Speaking of which, I've never thought of this rather cold, calculating aspect. I shudder to think what my collection's worth, collectively, these days. I've no intention of selling it, but I wonder where I'd stand from an insurance perspective in the case of, say, a house fire? Hypothetically speaking, say my collection had a retail (and hence, replacement) value of over £10,000 - comprised of many specimens worth anything from a few pounds to several hundred. What if the cabinets went up in flames with the rest of the house? As a whole collection, it's worth more than my household policy would cover as a named item. But individually, each specimen would qualify for cover. The same probably applies to my books - several thousand strong nowadays - and my cypraea collection. I wonder if I need to sort out specialist insurance?)



Read more: insectnet.proboards.com/thread/4182/extinct-british-plebejus-argus-masseyi#ixzz2pv0JUq3I

[Deleted]

I thought about this about 7 years ago so my son and I set about trying to put a value on my entire collection, it was a nightmare, for quite a lot of my stuff there is no "market value" as they are never offered anywhere and we gave up after a week of undervaluing everything, we got through about 15% of the entire exotics without touching the British and European stuff, I have never attempted it since. I would guess that even if you could find an insurer willing to give you a policy that they would provide the same "value for money" service that our good old car insurance companies do which in the UK is legalised robbery, such a specialised subject, I don't know how you would go about it but I would think that anyone willing to grant cover would come up with a million stipulations and get out clauses it would cause a nosebleed.

[leptraps]

I went through the Insurance Process for my collection in 2000 while living in Florida. I was concerned about Hurricanes. When I arrived in Kentucky later that year, I began the process all over. In the end I have insurance for the cabinets, drawers and other equipment/items related to the collection. Of the 5 insurance companies I talked with and who actually came to my home to see the collection, none, not one would insure the specimens. I have 28 Cabinets with 621 Cornell drawers, 150 spreading boards and my library. The total policy is for $322,000.00.

Consider the time to collect and prepare 100,000+ specimens, plus the cost of the pins (0.045 each), the expense of traveling to collect them and for some, the cost of a divorce when your wife has had enough. (Fortunately for me, my darling wife can never get enough of me {I will be married 49 years in August}, all of the PDP, Ethyl Acetate, Cyanide, envelopes, etc, etc.

It is not a cheap hobby. And more so if you purchase specimens.

[58chevy]

To me, the loss of a collection is more of an emotional rather than financial issue. Even if I were generously compensated financially, the emotional loss of a collection I've worked a lifetime to acquire would outweigh any financial reward. I would feel devastated even with the money. Therefore, in my case, I don't see any benefit in paying insurance premiums. I prefer to be careful and take my chances.

[jonathan]

The insurance might help to ease the pain in case of loss, but definitely some specimens are irreplaceable. Some specimens in my collection are extinct so money will not really help me to replace them. Still I am currently in the process to value my entire collection. It is taking me a lot of time and for the moment I have only valued 1,900 specimens and this is still the tip of the iceberg in my collection. Therefore since it is quite difficult to value my entire collection, I think that the best insurance I found is prevention.

[smallcopper]

Agreed, the emotional impact of losing one's collection would be horrendous - and I've already suffered it once many years ago to an extent at the hands of a malicious and vindictive ex-girlfriend! - and there's a famous precedent of the loss of a collection being a blow that the collector never recovered from: the famous 19th century clown Joseph Grimaldi specialised in collecting aberrations of L.bellargus, and when thieves broke into his rooms and, in the course of the robbery, destroyed his collection he was broken-hearted - so much so that he never resumed his butterfly collecting and took up pigeon-fancying instead. Charles Dickens (yes, *that* Charles Dickens!) described the wanton destruction of Grimaldi's L.bellargus collection as "the most heartless cruelty and abscence of all taste for scientifc pursuits".

Of course a collection's value goes way beyond the monetary - there's the scientific value, the aesthetic value and, connected to that, the emotional value. All of which leads me to another train of thought - what arrangements do we all make for, deep breath, our collections once we've slipped this mortal coil? (Having just passed 40 this year, I'm suddenly consumed not only with trying to keep my svelte, lean physique(!) but also with intimations of mortality. My son, sadly, has absolutely no interest in my collection. If I left it to him it'll just end up either neglected or broken up and sold piecemeal. Which isn't really what I feel, deep down, I would want for it. Not least because without a knowledge of WHAT the specimens are and represent, he'd have no idea of their intrinsic value or significance; and some unscrupulous dealer would offer a few thousand to take the collection from him, and then make a tidy profit from dissolving it; and more abstractly, because the collection seems worth more as a whole than as a sum of its parts, for the beyond-monetary values mentioned earlier.

Any thoughts?

[Deleted]

I thought about leaving my British collection to a museum, there being many extinct/historic/unique specimens in it and letting my son sell the exotics and divide the sum equally between my other children, alas I have seen too much neglect in this area so that is out for me now, I will sell up if I reach an age where I can still enjoy myself and feel that the time is right, it will be an enormous emotional thing to do it but the alternative would be as mentioned before some collector offering a few thousand pounds for the whole thing and making a killing on ebay, I would come back and haunt him. Nobody but myself could possibly apprechiate the attachment I have to most of the specimens in my collection, for self caught stuff remembering the lengths I went to, to procure them, and the memories of that collecting trip, for the older stuff knowing the history behind the specimens from Leech, Hemmings, L W Newman, Chalmers Hunt, Rothschild etc and the feeling of excitement at taking some of the stunning and rare exotics off the setting board, cannot be quantified in mere words but I would rather my offspring have some kind of benefit from my labours than see a dealer who is in if more for the money than the love rip off my family when I am gone.

[bobw]

People have made a lot of good points here. For most of us a lifetime's work has gone into building a collection and we have a deep emotional attachment to it. Opening any drawer can bring back evocative memories of field trips, or the first time we managed to purchase that rare bug. It's very hard to assign a monetary value to it as many specimens are irreplaceable. Personally I have a lot of type specimens and examples of taxa that have not been found for many years; these would be impossible to replace. Obviously it would be devastating for any of us to lose our collections but at least if it's insured we would get some compensation. Mine is currently uninsured but only because of the huge amount of work involved in cataloguing and valuing over 10,000 specimens; unfortunately this is a requirement by the insurance companies.

Another question that has been covered in this forum before is the fate of our collections on our demise. The options would seem to be: 1) leave it to a museum, 2) leave it to another collector, 3) leave it to family members to be sold, or 4) sell it before we die so we get some benefit from the income. Unfortunately most museums have no interest in acquiring insect collections and don't have the capability to look after them. The only museum I know of that is actively seeking and buying up collections is the McGuire Center, and I guess that they're only interested in specialist collections with a strong scientific content. I only really know the situation in the UK where BMNH is the major museum; they are offered many collections but only accept very few as they won't enhance their existing collections - they don't need more of the same stuff. They did send many off to provincial museums but these weren't looked after and ended up turning to dust. I guess that not many of us know serious younger collectors to whom we want to leave a collection so it means that most collections end up being sold - usually being broken up by dealers. I guess that most of us couldn't bear to sell our collections whilst we're still able to appreciate them, but if it came to it they could provide some useful income if we fell on hard times.  Obviously, family members with no interest could easily be ripped off so it would be as well to make some sort of provision for this ourselves before it gets to that point.

Personally I collect groups, i.e. a single genus or subfamily. Over the years I've started on a few of these then given up with them and sold my holding. My collections of the two major ones I've stuck with are promised to BMNH, but they only want these because I have a good working relationship with the staff there and I have a lot of taxa that are under-represented in their collections.

Bob