Personal & Family

The covers in this category are the ones nobody buys deliberately. They arrive attached to a household policy, or they do not arrive at all, and their absence is discovered at the point of claim. Family liability is the clearest example: it responds when a member of the household causes injury or damage to someone else, off the property as well as on it, and it is the cover most likely to be quietly missing from a policy assembled around the building.

Water damage deserves its own place here because it is the most frequent household claim in Portugal by a wide margin, and the one where the wording does the most work. Whether the escape of water is covered, whether the cost of finding the leak is covered, and whether damage to a neighbour's flat below is covered are three separate questions with three separate answers, and they differ between insurers rather than being fixed by law.

The rest of the category deals with the household as an employer and as a legal entity. Employing a nanny, a driver, a gardener or a housekeeper in Portugal makes you an employer with statutory obligations, workers' compensation among them, and informality about that is a liability rather than a saving. We also cover personal legal expenses, fraud and extortion cover, and what happens to jointly held policies during a separation or divorce — a moment at which cover routinely lapses because each party assumes the other is maintaining it.