A million dollars of additional liability protection for roughly the cost of a streaming subscription. The best value in personal insurance, and the one most people skip.
A personal umbrella policy adds liability coverage above the limits on your home, auto, and other underlying policies — typically $1 million or more, usually for a few hundred dollars a year. It matters because liability claims above a standard auto or homeowners limit come out of your assets and future earnings, and because the events that generate them are ordinary: a car accident, a dog bite, a guest injured at your house.
Sits above your auto and homeowners liability limits and pays when they're exhausted.
Usually paid outside the limit, meaning legal fees don't erode the coverage available to pay a judgment.
Many umbrellas cover claims your primary policies exclude — libel, slander, and false arrest among them.
Extends over landlord policies, which is why anyone with rental property should carry one.
Extends over boat, RV, and ATV liability where those policies are properly underlying.
Personal liability follows you, not just your address.
The usual advice is that an umbrella is for wealthy people. That's backwards — the more useful test is whether a judgment above your current limits would materially damage your life. For most households the answer is yes, because judgments can attach to future wages, not just present savings.
Situations where an umbrella moves from sensible to important:
An umbrella requires you to carry minimum underlying limits on the policies beneath it — commonly $250,000/$500,000 on auto liability and $300,000 on homeowners liability. If your current limits are lower, raising them is part of the cost of the umbrella, and it's a reason the total price is sometimes more than the umbrella premium alone.
When a claim exceeds the underlying limit, the primary policy pays to its limit and the umbrella picks up from there. Defense costs are typically outside the umbrella limit, which matters more than people realize — a long defense on a serious claim can consume six figures before any judgment is paid.
One practical point: umbrellas are cheapest and simplest when the underlying policies are with the same agency, because someone is checking that the underlying limits still qualify. Umbrellas fail most often not through exclusion but because an underlying limit dropped below the requirement and nobody noticed.
Licensed in five states. We write this coverage across North and South Carolina — our primary markets — as well as Tennessee, Virginia, and Florida.