Insurance & Securing toys - tips, questions and options (browse whole topic)

It's difficult if you have a particularly large collection (several hundred or more), especially as the people best qualified to assess the value of our collections are we ourselves. Even toy dealers might not have the specialised knowledge of Transformers needed to give an accurate estimate of a collections value.

It might be good for us to cultivate some friendships with people who have a sideline as dealers, just to get them to countersign a letter confirming our estimation of the collection's value.

How about Tiby as an authority on Transformers? He did appear in the Collectors TV show :)

I'm looking at insurance for my collection, what I need to do first is value my collection. How do you guys value your collection? Do you check on eBay, BBTS, have a formula to work it out?

My collection is mostly TFTM and newer so I'd guess it's not that expensive but I still need to value it.

See here dude :)

can anyone help in regard to insuring tf's.mine are insured but what total should i insure them for(like average price per tf)?and how regularly should i update the insured total.

Good question. i was thinking to do the same, considering the cash , time and effort we all put into them

thats the problem how do u come up with a total and i know some insurers will only insure up to $4000 total (nrma,racq)and some will do a estimate(suncorp).

I believe you need to take out itemised home content insurance. Photograph every toy and then get figure out how much it would cost to replace the collection. There is a special kind of insurance for collections I believe... I was speaking to a bank about this about a month and a half ago. It would be a _lot_ of effort to itemise each toy you want to insure though. :rolleyes: But yeah, I believe that's the way to go.

Depends on the insurer, but you will DEFINITELY need an extra policy to cover them.

The name for it varies, but it's generally along the lines of 'personal valuables', and covers special items like sporting gear, expensive jewellery pieces that go above the standard amount, etc.

From there, there's a few different methods and options, ie some will only list individually, others let you give an overall estimate.

It's vitally important that you take photographs of EVERYTHING you want insured. These photos must be dated, and keep them somewhere where, if the worst case were to happen, you'd still have copies of those photos.

You will probably have a little bit of difficulty in getting them to grasp what you're after. When I got mine years ago, nobody knew how to process it, considering it was collectibles that weren't sport related. It was kinda funny, and it did mean I'd get calls out of the blue from the insurance guys asking me if I knew anything about *insert pop culture collectible here* and what would I estimate them at. I was their go-to-geek (I was working for the bank, btw, not just a random guy off the street).

And if you list a total, triple check it. Seriously. We ALWAYS undervalue for insurance, and well, you want it to realistically cover everything. Don't be stingy, it'll only come back to haunt you should the worst happen.

This has been covered (no pun intended :p) a few times iamirondude. Do a quick search of the forum and you may find the answers you're after.