While Moissanite rings are far less expensive than comparable diamond rings, the overall investment can still be significant. That sizable investment can often lead couples to wonder if insurance is an option for them.
Can you insure a Moissanite ring? Moissanite rings can be insured, the same way that diamond rings often are. Once rings are insured, claims can often be filed for loss, theft, or physical damage. The cost of coverage will depend on the amount of insurance needed and the specific insurance channels that you seek coverage through.
In the paragraphs that follow, we’ll share information on the cost and process of insuring your Moissanite rings. Certain insurance channels are typically cheaper than others, so we’ll explain your options below.
Insurance Isn’t Just For Diamond Jewelry
It’s common for me to get questions about whether Moissanite engagement rings or Moissanite wedding rings can be insured. There’s a common feeling that it makes sense to insure expensive diamond jewelry, but Moissanite owners aren’t sure if insurance companies would even cover their less expensive Moissanite jewelry. They also worry that the cost of insurance might be too high for coverage to make sense. Neither of those assumptions are true. Coverage is available for Moissanite, and the insurance provides incredibly inexpensive peace of mind!
Whether your Moissanite ring was $800 or $5,000, ring insurance can protect you from the common issues that might lead to loss and replacement.
What Could Go Wrong?
It’s really hard to anticipate the loss of a ring due to damage, theft, or misplacement. Even if you’ve had your ring for decades without any problems, your track record could change quickly.
When my wife and I had been married for about 5 years, we had a window company install new replacement windows in our home. Earlier that day, my wife had been doing some cleaning and removed her diamond ring to protect it. She set it on a window sill nearby and fully intended to slip it back on a few minutes later when she finished cleaning.
Later that afternoon, my wife went looking for her ring, but the window sill was bare. The empty sill sat next to a brand new window. My wife couldn’t believe that the ring was missing, so we scoured the area both inside and outside of the window, guessing that it got knocked to the ground accidentally. When our search turned up nothing, we called the window company to see if they had seen the ring. At first, they seemed to think we were off our rocker but said they hadn’t seen anything…but the owner later found that one of his employees had knowingly brushed the ring into one of his tarps. In a moment of poor judgment, he apparently took the ring to see if he could sell it. Fortunately, we got the ring back, because we had no insurance, and it would have been painful to come out of pocket for a replacement ring at the time.
Jewelry insurance typically covers your ring against loss, theft, and physical damage. That type of protection is reassuring because even if your ring just slips off your finger while you’re playing in the ocean, you’ll be able to get a replacement!
Why You Need Insurance
Hopefully, you’ve never lost or damaged a special ring in the past. When your ring is uninsured and the unthinkable does happen, it’s painful in two very different ways. First, you have the emotional pain of losing a ring with deep sentimental value. Second, there’s the financial impact. It can really hurt to shell out thousands of dollars to replace a ring! It’s like adding insult to injury in many ways. If you can’t afford a comparable replacement, you sometimes end up with a very different kind of ring to tide you over, which can also be sad.
My younger sister once damaged her beautiful diamond ring. She had it sitting on the bathroom counter while she showered. When she later reached for it, the ring somehow got bumped off the counter and hit their tile floor. As she picked up the ring and examined it, she noticed something horrifying…the diamond had cracked right down the middle! She learned that day that diamonds are incredibly hard (scratch resistant), but extreme hardness also makes them very brittle (susceptible to cracking or breaking with the right kind of impact)!
Moissanite is the second hardest stone known to man—it’s even harder than Sapphire! That means it also has great scratch resistance but it may be more brittle than many other types of stones too. Don’t get me wrong, diamonds and moissanite don’t crack or break easily, but it certainly can happen… and that’s the very type of unexpected damage, and loss, that ring insurance can help protect you from.
Fortunately, my sister’s ring was insured! Their business was going through a slump at the time and money was tight, so her options would have been extremely limited without the insurance payout.
Ring Insurance Options
You have a few different options when it comes to insuring your Moissanite ring. I’ll briefly explain all of them so you can decide what fits your finances and coverage needs best.
Adding Your Ring as a Rider to an Existing Policy
You can often get coverage for jewelry items under your existing homeowner’s or renter’s policy. Coverage amounts and exclusions (exceptions to coverage) vary by insurance company, so please ask your insurance agent, or broker, for those important details. Here’s some general information on how this type of coverage normally works.
Some policies have a small amount of built-in protection for jewelry. That provision often covers losses up to $1,500 or so. If your ring would cost less than about $1,500 to replace, this coverage option may be a fit for you. There are some potential downsides though, which I’ll cover in a moment.
If your ring costs more than the minimal amount of coverage that’s included, you would need your agent to add a personal property rider to your existing policy. Again, this would be the case for both homeowner’s insurance and renter’s insurance.
Potential Problems with Using a Homeowners or Renter’s Policy
Insuring through an existing policy isn’t always the best option. This type of coverage may protect you from theft or damage, but probably won’t protect you against loss (where you just misplace it), for example. That additional coverage is important for peace of mind. Sometimes, you may suspect theft, but you have no evidence of theft (no signs of forced entry and no police report). Your homeowner’s policy may or may not cover such a situation, but you’d likely have broader and better coverage through a dedicated jewelry insurance policy through a company that specializes in those (I’ll talk more about this option in a moment).
If you need to add a personal property rider because your ring is worth more than $1,000 to $1,500, the cost of that coverage will likely be slightly more expensive than coverage through other channels might be. If you file a claim under a policy that’s connected to your homeowner’s or renter’s policy, it might increase your premiums going forward—which is where this type of coverage could get really expensive!
I once filed a claim against my homeowner’s policy to cover about $6,000 worth of property damage. It was nice to get the check from them, but that payout was followed by years and years of higher premiums. At the end of the day, it felt like I simply got a loan from the company that I had to pay back in installments (higher premiums) over time. What’s worse, is that simply filing that claim labeled me a higher risk, so as I shopped for different providers, they all quoted me higher policy pricing. It was a situation that I couldn’t shop my way out of. I learned through that experience to only use my homeowner’s policy for catastrophic losses (significant damage caused by earthquakes or major storms for example).
Check with your agent to see how a claim against your rider would be handled by your insurer (whether it could potentially raise your rates following the claim). If that’s a possibility, I would personally avoid going this route.
Coverage Through a Jewelry Insurance Company
When you insure through a dedicated jewelry insurance company, you separate your ring coverage from your homeowner’s or renter’s policy. That means that if you have to file a claim at some point, that claim won’t affect the cost of your other policy in any way!
My favorite ring insurance company offers really nice benefits. They cover 125% of the value of your ring, for example. That’s important because we see inflation happening all around us. It would be sad to find that you have to replace your ring with something lesser because the cost of an identical replacement has gone higher than the amount you originally insured it for. This also protects you against the risk of a poor appraisal that pegs the value of your ring lower than it should have actually been.
In addition to coverage for physical damage, loss, and theft, they offer coverage for “Mysterious Disappearance,” which essentially means that you have no idea what happened to your ring…it’s just gone and you’re not sure when it happened or how. I love that their coverage has no deductible of any kind. I also appreciate the fact that they allow you to get your repair or replacement from a local jeweler that you trust…rather than having the insurer decide what to send you as a replacement. You can go back to the same jeweler that you originally purchased from to get something truly identical if you’d like!
Fortunately, the process is incredibly simple. It only takes about 3 minutes to get the quote and start coverage online. It’s also very affordable! Most policies are less than $5 a month ($60 a year)! You can review additional information on the benefits they offer and get a free quote, here.
Self Insurance
One final option that’s worth a quick mention in self-insuring your ring. If paying for a replacement ring wouldn’t cause much financial turbulence in your life, then self-insuring might be a possibility. This simply means that you’re ready, willing, and able to essentially write a check for a new ring if needed—so you opt to not pay for traditional insurance.
Sometimes some simple math is helpful when making decisions about potentially self-insuring. If you have a $3,000 Moissanite ring that would cost $4.17 a month ($50.04 per year) to insure, for example, it would take almost 60 years for you to end up saving money by self-insuring—if you had to replace the ring even once over the span of those years. That assumes though that the cost of comparable replacement rings stays flat over a 60-year period, which is certainly unlikely. It also assumes that you only have one instance of loss, theft, or damage. If you had more than one instance, self-insurance could end up being many times more expensive.
After looking over some basic calculations, even those that could afford to self insure, often see wisdom in purchasing a policy to protect their ring.
Factors That Influence Your Cost of Coverage
The value of your ring and the amount of insurance coverage you’re seeking will be the most basic factors, but your location is also a component of pricing. There are two common-sense factors that location plays into. First, the likelihood of crime. Second, the cost of jewelry where you live. Both crime and the cost of replacement jewelry would likely be higher in Los Angeles, California, than it would be in Huntsville, Alabama for example. Location doesn’t cause wild swings in the cost of coverage, but it can have a mild impact.
The specific materials your ring is made of (Diamond, Moissanite, Sapphire, gold, platinum, etc) will have no real bearing on cost, other than establishing value. The value of your ring will typically be established by an appraisal.
Where to Get Your Ring Appraised
Reputable local jewelers are often a good place to go for ring appraisals. You’ll likely pay $50 to $75 to have an appraisal done, but it’s valuable information to have because an independent expert documents the value of your ring, but also so you can know some of the important details about your stone that you might not otherwise be aware of. The appraisal may provide information on the cut, color and inclusions for your specific stones. The unique combination of those details will help you to identify your stones in case of theft, but they will also help you to get the most similar replacement possible if that’s ever needed.
How Much Will It Cost to Cover a Moissanite Ring?
I’ll provide some general pricing information—but you can get a quote that’s specific to your exact ring and location here. The process is really quick! Within about 30 seconds, you’ll have your quote and can then decide if it’s a good fit.
In my experience, coverage for most Moissanite rings will hover around $50 per year (roughly $4.20 a month). Your quote may be slightly higher or lower, based on your ring value and location, but I’d guess that it comes in pretty close to that number.
If you have valuable earrings or other jewelry that you’d hate to lose, they can cover those items inexpensively as well!
Things to Watch Out For
There are a few potential pitfalls related to insuring your ring. I’ll quickly address them so you know what to look for and ask questions about.
Inaccurate appraisals:
Some appraisers frequently overvalue the rings they assess. When that happens, you can end up paying for more coverage than you really need. What’s even worse, is that once a claim is filed, your insurance company may push back on your ring’s value, claiming that the appraisal isn’t accurate.
On the other end of the spectrum, if a ring is undervalued, you may not get a large enough payout to cover your actual replacement costs. The risk of a poor appraisal is one of the reasons that I strongly prefer the insurance company that I linked to above. Their 125% coverage protects you if you should ever find that you didn’t have as much coverage as you ultimately needed in order to be made whole following a claim.
Exclusions:
Your homeowners or rental insurance policy has lots of fine print, in fact, all insurance policies do. Those details matter when it’s time to file a claim. Part of the fine print that we often gloss over has to do with exclusions—or the specific scenarios where the insurance company won’t have liability for a claim under the policy. An example might be the exclusion that some life insurance policies could have for extreme activities, like Skydiving. If your policy has that exclusion, and you die while skydiving, they won’t pay a benefit, whether you remember seeing that exclusion or not.
It would be sad to pay for a policy believing that you have coverage, only to learn that there’s an exclusion in your policy that excludes coverage for loss or damage which takes place while you’re traveling abroad. Unfortunately, most people only learn about the exclusions after filing a claim. Understanding the exclusions while your shopping for a policy will help you to ensure you’re getting the best value, and most comprehensive coverage, possible
Deductibles:
The initial portion of any loss that you’re responsible to absorb before insurance begins paying on a claim, is your deductible. Most home insurance policies might have a deductible of $500, $1,000, or $1,500 for example. If you were to file a $2,000 claim for your damaged ring, but you had a $1,500 deductible, the insurance company would only end up paying you $500 to help you replace your ring. That might come as a frustrating surprise if you weren’t initially aware.
The price you’re quoted for adding coverage for your $2,000 ring to your homeowner’s policy might seem fantastic until you realize that the only insurance you really have, is the amount that’s the difference between your deductible and the full value of your ring. In light of the small amount of potential payout, you may find that the coverage offered by your homeowner’s policy turns out to be your most expensive option in some cases.
The insurance provider that I linked to above has no deductibles, so you’re never asked to personally absorb any portion of the accepted loss.
Getting Your Replacement:
If you file a claim, will you have the option of getting a replacement ring, or simply getting a check? Will you be able to pick the retailer that you purchase the replacement ring from? Will you be able to pick your own replacement ring, or will the insurance company decide, on their own, what they think is most comparable and force you to accept it?
Hopefully, you can see that while price is an important consideration, it certainly isn’t the only consideration. It’s really not even the most one. In order to have real peace of mind, you need to make sure that you won’t have unfortunate surprises when the unthinkable happens.
You Shouldn’t Wait Until Tomorrow to Insure Your Ring
Unfortunately, you can’t buy life insurance from the back of an ambulance while you’re racing to the emergency room, and you can’t buy fire insurance once your house is already on fire. Similarly, it’s too late to protect your ring once unexpected loss or damage has taken place.
Procrastination often costs us dearly. We have every intention to take care of dozens of important things “later.” Unfortunately, we often eventually regret not acting sooner.
The process of securing insurance coverage for your ring almost couldn’t be simpler or more affordable. It’s something you should do now, so you can live with greater peace of mind and not add one more thing to your ever-expanding to-do list!
In Conclusion
You have numerous options for insuring your Moissanite engagement or Moissanite wedding ring. Get a quote, ask questions, and secure a policy. It’s something you won’t regret!
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