Homeowner's Insurance, An Annual Savings Reminder
Welcome to Saving Money with Andrew!
Each year in late December, we receive our homeowner’s insurance bill for the following year. And each year, I’m shocked by how high it is.
In Saving on Renter's and Homeowner's Insurance, I wrote about strategies I use to save on our homeowner’s insurance. And the WSJ ran a great article recently with some similar great tips.
We live in a hurricane zone with a major storm every year, so our bills tend to be very high. This year, our homeowners bill was up $193 from last year. I’d already saved a lot by using the tips from last year’s post, so I called my insurance company and asked the agent for any other ideas to reduce our bill.
We went through the policy and noted that the deductible were already as high as possible, but we noticed the dwelling coverage was unnecessarily high.
Why? When we bought our home, our lender required dwelling coverage equal to the mortgage balance, ignoring that much of our home’s value came from the land it was on. Even worse, our insurer was automatically increasing our dwelling coverage each year to reflect inflation. Simply rolling back the coverage to last year’s level reduced our premium back to last year’s level, a $193 savings. I’ve since set an annual reminder to check with our agent to check our dwelling coverage and get a similar savings each year until it’s at a reasonable level that keeps us protected if there’s a disaster, but not over-insured.
And now, Andrew’s pick(s) of the week:
We eat a lot of apples in our household, so we take the “official” Apple Rankings seriously. Our favorite by far? Honeycrisp, despite being expensive and not very resilient. The biggest disappointment? The overhyped Cosmic Crisp.
Also:
Eight Questions to Ask Your Aging Parents (and Yourself) to Keep Their Phones Safe From Hackers
For Landlords, Rising Housing Costs Make It Harder to Earn Passive Income
Many Hospitals Get Big Drug Discounts. That Doesn’t Mean Markdowns for Patients
Finally, it’s the beginning of the end for incandescent AND compact fluorescent bulbs! Biden administration moves to phase out compact fluorescent light bulbs. Having written several posts urging readers to ditch their old bulbs in favor of cheap and efficient LEDs, I’m really happy about this news.
I hope this has been helpful. If you liked it, please share it on social media! Also, please send me your feedback, requests, and success stories.