Summer in Oklahoma: Here's What You Should Be Thinking About With Insurance

Summer in Oklahoma is a season of extremes. The storms get bigger, the lake gets busier, the backyard fills up with people, and the calendar fills up with weddings, reunions, and weekends at the cabin. It's the best stretch of the year for a lot of Oklahomans, and it's also the stretch where the most claims get filed.

Most of those claims trace back to the same thing: a policy that was set up for how life looked in January, not how it looks in July.
​
This is a good time of year to walk through the coverage that actually matters once the weather warms up. Not a sales pitch, just a checklist of what's worth a second look before the season gets going.

get the best okLAHOMA home insurance!

Start With the Storms

If you own a home in Oklahoma, summer weather is the first thing on the list. July hail and August straight-line winds do real damage here every single year, and the gap between what people think their policy covers and what it actually covers tends to show up in the middle of a claim rather than before one.
​
It's worth understanding what your home insurance actually covers during a summer storm in Oklahoma before you need to find out the hard way. Pay particular attention to how your roof is covered, because the difference between replacement cost and actual cash value on an older roof can be tens of thousands of dollars.

A couple of related pieces are easy to overlook:

• The shed, the detached garage, the fence, and the pergola all fall under a different part of your policy. Here's how detached structure coverage works in Oklahoma and why that limit is often lower than people expect.
• Knowing what home insurance won't cover in Oklahoma matters just as much as knowing what it will. Flood and certain wind-driven water situations are the usual surprises.

If your home insurance hasn't been reviewed in a few years, summer is the right time to fix that. You can get the right Oklahoma home insurance here.

The Toys Come Out of the Garage

This is the part of the year where coverage gets missed most often, because the things people use in summer sit unused the rest of the year.

A boat on Lake Hefner or Grand Lake, a camper headed to Broken Bow, an ATV at the deer lease, a motorcycle finally back on the road. Your home and auto policies were not built to cover any of those, and a lot of owners assume they're protected when they're not.

• A boat is its own policy with its own liability concerns on a crowded summer lake. Here's boat insurance in Oklahoma.
• Heading out in the camper or the fifth-wheel? RV insurance covers situations a standard auto policy won't.
• Off-road gear has its own exposure. ATV insurance is worth a look before the first ride.
• Two wheels back on the road means motorcycle insurance deserves a fresh review, especially your liability limits.

​The pattern with all of these is the same: people buy the toy and forget the coverage, then find out in July that the policy they assumed was there never existed.

More People in Your Backyard Means More Liability

Summer is the season of guests. Pool parties, the grill going every weekend, kids running through sprinklers, the trampoline that's been up since spring. Every one of those is a liability question, and most homeowners never think about it until someone gets hurt.
​
Your homeowners policy includes a liability limit, but it's often lower than it should be once you start hosting regularly. This is exactly the situation an umbrella policy in Oklahoma is built for. It sits on top of your home and auto liability and picks up where those leave off, usually for a surprisingly small premium relative to the protection it adds.

If you regularly have people over in the summer, this is the single most overlooked piece of coverage on this list.

Summer Events Have Their Own Coverage

Weddings, family reunions, graduation parties, fundraisers. If you're hosting or renting a venue for a larger event, the venue will often require proof of coverage, and your homeowners policy generally won't extend to it.
​
Event insurance is a short-term, single-event policy that handles exactly this. It's inexpensive, it's quick to set up, and it keeps one bad moment at a big gathering from turning into a personal financial problem.

Don't Forget What's Inside the House

People focus on the structure during storm season and forget about everything inside it. How personal property coverage works on your Oklahoma policy is worth understanding before you file a claim, not after.
​
And if you've added anything of real value, jewelry, a nicer camera, tools, collectibles, know that standard policies cap those categories well below what the items are worth. That's where scheduled personal property coverage for valuables in Oklahoma comes in.

A summer side note: if you've started running anything out of the house, even seasonally, it's worth knowing whether your home insurance covers your home-based business. It usually doesn't.

Flood Is the Quiet One

Summer storms don't only bring wind and hail. Heavy rain backs up creeks and overwhelms drainage, and homeowners insurance does not cover flood damage, period. You don't have to be in a designated flood zone for it to happen, and a separate flood insurance policy is the only thing that handles it.

The Easiest Way to Handle All of This

The common thread through every item above is that summer changes your risk, and a policy set up months ago rarely keeps up on its own. That's the case for working with an independent insurance agent in Oklahoma City who can look at the whole picture, compare carriers, and find the gaps before the season does.
​
A short review now is a lot cheaper than a surprise in the middle of a claim.

Get a free review of your summer coverage here.

​Quick summer coverage checklist

•  Home insurance reviewed (roof: replacement cost vs. ACV?)
• Detached structures limit checked (shed, garage, fence)
• Boat / RV / ATV / motorcycle policies in place and active
• Umbrella policy considered for backyard liability
• Event insurance lined up for any large summer gathering
• Valuables scheduled if they exceed standard limits
• Flood insurance in place (separate from home policy)
• Home-based business exposure addressed if applicable

NEED HOME INSURANCE RIGHT FOR OKLAHOMA?

---

Scott Godwin
Founder

Oklahoma Insurance Professionals LLC serves Oklahoma City and the surrounding Oklahoma communities by protecting the people we work with just like we protect our own family members. Home insurance, auto insurance, business insurance, and more. 

Whether in Moore, Edmond, Norman, Oklahoma City or surrounding areas, We can help you find the coverage you need.​​