Most stamp collectors do not have stamp insurance. Some mistakenly believe that they are covered under their ordinary home owners policy. But like other hard assets, such as jewelry and coins, home owners policies have very low limits for what they pay for stamp losses. Most home owners insurance policies will let you schedule your collection as an insured asset but, for most of these companies that don’t do philatelic material as a specialty, the rates are high for stamps and the appraisal requirements burdensome.
Most collectors even question whether they need stamp insurance. Stamps have become a very unattractive theftable in the last twenty years. Collections haven’t gone up much in value, leaving most stamp collections with a high weight to value ratio. It is true that 90% of the value of each stamp collection is in one or two of perhaps scores of volumes, but your average home break in artist doesn’t have much philatelic knowledge and wouldn’t know to take your first issue Mexico specialty collection and leave your daughter’s old Disney stamps. Too, the value of stamps on the “fenced” market is very low. Fewer stamp shops means, if nothing else, fewer places to try to sell stolen material and the scanning of better stamps has left a permanent record of an owners property that could get a thief busted if he is caught with stamps that years ago would have been untraceable. We often hear of homes that are robbed and the stamp collections, even very valuable ones, left untouched. And it is very rare to have a home fire, and even rarer to have one that damages a stamp collection.
So the question arises of whether you should insure your stamps at all. On the plus side, the rates are very low and even very valuable collections rarely cost more than a couple hundred dollars a year to insure with minimal reporting requirements. In general, most people insure themselves for things that they can’t afford to lose, such as their home and life, and leave less valuable things to chance, that is, self insurance. But rates are so low that maybe you should check here or here for the two biggest stamp insurers in the United States to see if their rates are attractive enough to make sense for you.