The policy came out of the filing cabinet on the first Sunday of June, the same week the radio started saying the word "season" with a certain tone. I set it on the kitchen table next to a cup of coffee, a highlighter and a legal pad. Ben looked at the stack, looked at me, and went to mow. Fair enough. Somebody had to read the thing, and I spent last fall reading insurance quotes, so I had a head start.
A quick note before anything else: I am not an insurance person and this isn't advice. It is just what we found in our own paperwork and what we decided to do about it. Your policy, your state and your house will all be different.
Why we finally read it
Last October our renewal jumped from $1,840 a year to $2,390. I shopped around and we moved to a second insurer at $2,010. At the time, I compared mostly the price and the big headline coverage numbers. I skimmed the rest. That has been nagging me since, because the part of the policy that matters during a storm is exactly the part I skimmed.
Inland South Carolina doesn't take hurricanes head-on the way the coast does, but the leftovers still reach us. Wind, sideways rain, trees down, power out for a day or two. We have two big pecan trees on a half-acre lot and a 1958 roof line. It felt like time.
What we found, page by page
The wind and hail deductible
This was the first surprise. Our regular deductible is a flat dollar amount, but wind and hail claims carry a separate deductible of 2% of the dwelling coverage. I had seen the percentage last fall and not done the math. As an illustration, on a home insured for $250,000, 2% is $5,000 out of pocket before the policy pays anything for wind damage. That is a very different number from the one I had in my head. We did the math on our own coverage, wrote it on the legal pad, and circled it.
We didn't change it. Lowering it would have raised the premium. What we did was move a portion of our savings into a separate account labeled, without much poetry, "Wind Deductible," so the money is there and doesn't get borrowed for a car repair.
Flooding is not in there
I knew this in the back of my mind, but reading the exclusion in plain print was something else. Standard homeowners coverage, at least ours, does not cover flood. Water that comes in from the ground up is a separate kind of policy entirely. Our house isn't in a mapped flood zone, and I would have told you a month ago that flooding wasn't our worry. Then I remembered the low spot at the back corner of the lot that turns into a pond during a heavy storm, and the street drain that backs up every time it really pours.
This month we added a separate flood policy for about $480 a year. The agent mentioned there is usually a waiting period before flood coverage takes effect, which made me glad we didn't wait until a storm was already on the map.
Trees, fences and the shed
I underlined everything about trees. From what I read in our policy, a tree that falls on the house or the shed is handled differently than a tree that falls in an open part of the yard, and removal coverage has its own limits. The shed out back counts under "other structures" with its own lower limit. None of this changed what we bought, but it changed what we did that weekend: Ben walked both pecans with a pair of binoculars looking for dead limbs over the roof, and we called someone to take down one long dead branch reaching toward the carport.
What we did after reading
- Took a video inventory. I walked through every room with my phone, opening closets and drawers and narrating as I went. It took twenty-five minutes. Lila provided commentary.
- Saved copies in two places. The policy, the declarations page and the video live in a cloud folder, and a printed copy of the declarations page sits in a zip-top bag in our storm bin.
- Wrote down the claim phone number on an index card taped inside a kitchen cabinet, because phones die when the power is out.
- Made a short list of questions for the agent instead of calling every time I got confused. She answered all of them in one fifteen-minute call.
The whole exercise took two afternoons and one phone call, and I came out of it less anxious rather than more. It is easier to sleep through a windy night when you know the numbers instead of guessing at them.
The storm bin is restocked now, the dead branch is down, and the highlighted policy is back in the filing cabinet with a sticky note on the front that says "read again in May." I suspect future me will appreciate that.
