Risk Assessment

What Is a Risk Assessment?

A risk assessment is a sort of investigation that helps you take a hard look at yourself, your home, and your neighborhood to determine what kind of crimes or accidents you're most likely to encounter.

You should do a risk assessment before you consider purchasing any kind of home security system. This will help you determine what kind of protection you need. A risk assessment can keep you from a spending unnecessary money on a super complex home security system that you might not need. Instead, it shows you exactly what would be a good idea for your home.

Steps to a Doing a Risk Assessment

Step 1: Gather Facts

In this step, you're going to talk with the pros (police, fire, and insurers can often give you detailed statistics on crimes that have occurred in your area along with accidents such as fire and natural disasters). You'll also want to talk to your neighbors, especially if they have lived in the area longer than you, in order to find out what sort of crimes or vandalism they've noticed or been victim to. This could be anything from burglars breaking into homes to kids spray painting on walls.

Don't rule yourself out as a source. When you're working on your risk assessment, you'll want to write down your observations on the condition of your house and neighborhood and how far away you are from police and fire stations. Also note personal habits--predictable routines can make you easier for criminals to target.

Step 2: Analysis

In this stage, you're going to want to look at the facts you recorded in step 1 and rank problem areas depending on how likely you believe you are to fall victim to them. A book like The Complete Idiot's Guide to Home Security can really help in this stage because it shows you how to rank things and even provides some worksheets.

Step 3: Identifying Your Weaknesses

At this point in your risk assessment you should know what kind of security problems (not just crimes but accidents like fire) that are most likely to trouble you. You should also have a basic idea of how likely these things are to happen and how bad they'll be (i.e. if there's a fire station down the block, it's very likely you'll be serviced quickly in the event of an emergency).

Some risks you can probably live with (i.e. having your mailbox vandalized), but some risks are intolerable (i.e. injury or worse) and you must work at eliminating those kind of risks completely. What will it take to eliminate that risk? These are the kinds of things you need to think about when shopping for home security systems and taking measures to make your house is as fire- and accident-proof as possible.

Detailed Risk Assessments Can Lower Home Insurance Costs

Performing a detailed risk assessment of your home and neighborhood may actually help you reduce your insurance rates. Such careful planning shows your insurance company that you're serious about protecting your home and assets. Write down your risk assessment and also a security plan detailing what you have done to make your house more secure, then ask for a meeting with your insurance agent. If he or she brushes you off (won't consider reducing your rate), let them know you'll be looking for an insurer who can.

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