BISMARCK, ND (KXNEWS) — Many people who live in North Dakota are familiar with traveling somewhere warm, especially over winter. But before you pack your beach towels, insurance experts say it’s an important time of year to make sure your home, vehicle, and valuables that stay behind are insured.

“Coming into winter, we have a lot of people that go south, right? That spend their summers here, six months here, six months down there. So, I have some of the same clients that call every year. We do things with their home, with their auto insurance, while they’re gone, right? So, if they take one vehicle down there, leave a vehicle in Arizona, they may have a couple of other ones that are up here in North Dakota, so they’re not driving that. What we can do is we can kind of strip down the coverage as far as what they have on their insurance policy. Removing liability, things like that, and just going into what we call, comp-only.” said Hanson, “Comprehensive coverage on the personal auto policy is part of the physical damage, and it would cover things like hail damage, if it were to get burnt up in a fire, somebody were to come in and steal it, those types of things. So, it’s important that you keep that coverage on there, because a big misconception that I hear a lot is that if my car is parked in my garage in my house, and my house burns down, wouldn’t my homeowner’s insurance cover my auto? And the answer is no, it would not. You would have to have that comprehensive coverage on the auto policy, on that particular vehicle to make sure there’s coverage if something like that happened.”

Blake Hanson from Bravera Insurance says he’s extra busy this time of year, as people prepare to go somewhere warmer. He also recommends getting a plan in place to check on your home while gone.

“On the house side of things, shutting off your water, making sure that you have someone that comes in and maybe checks on it. There’s a lot of really cool tools these days. You can buy apps that have sensors that will sense if there’s water or those types of things. Most people that I talk to today, and I usually recommend, if you are going to be leaving your house, for a period of time, it might be a good idea to get cameras. And to have a smart system in your house. You can monitor the temperature; it’ll alert you if it dips below a certain level inside your house. All of those things can prevent a type of loss because over the years. I have definitely had people come back from Arizona, and they’ve had some losses, right? And from there, they made some different changes to make sure that never happens again, because you can imagine, if you have a water loss in your house, and it’s been there for 2-3 weeks, a month, you can imagine how ugly that looks inside the house.” said Hanson.

To check out Bravera Bank, click here.