I had my own deductible wrong

Good morning. The policy packet arrived Friday. Fifty-one pages, a rubber band, and a cover letter that apologized for the delay without saying what the delay had been.

I first asked for it in the middle of August. I told you it would take about a week. It took twenty-four days, and it arrived because on the fourth call I asked the representative for her name and her extension, which is what I should have done on the first call.

I read the declarations page standing at the kitchen counter with my coat still on. The number I want to write about today is on that page. It was not the number I went looking for.

Rate increases are slowing, on average. S&P Global Market Intelligence reported this morning that the effective approved homeowners rate change nationally came down from roughly 13.6% in 2024 to about 6.3% in 2025, and to about 1.8% through July of this year. The firm describes a fragmented market: Minnesota and Colorado ran at about 17.8% and 16.6% in 2025 and have dropped to about 1.6% and 0.8% so far in 2026, while North Carolina has gone the other way. The national figure averages thousands of filings across fifty states. Your renewal comes out of one filing, in one state, from one company.

Insurance Journal, 7 September

The Atlantic has produced no hurricanes. Five short-lived tropical storms and no hurricanes so far, with accumulated cyclone energy at 4.4, the lowest reading since 1941. The statistical peak of the season is 10 September, and Phil Klotzbach of Colorado State puts the odds of well-below-average activity over the next two weeks at 97%. A quiet season does not change the deductible printed on your policy. That figure is set at renewal.

Insurance Journal, 4 September

Your Medicare plan’s Annual Notice of Change is in the mail this month. Medicare’s own description of the notice is short: your plan sends it each fall, in September, it lists the changes to coverage and costs that take effect in January, and if you do not receive it you should contact your plan. Annual enrollment runs 15 October to 7 December. If you do nothing, you are re-enrolled in the same plan under next year’s terms.

Medicare.gov

Most people can tell you their deductible. They say a number: five hundred, a thousand, twenty-five hundred. For a lot of homeowners that answer is only half right, because the policy carries more than one deductible and at least one of them may be written as a percentage.

New York’s Department of Financial Services lays out three types under a typical homeowners policy. There is the standard deductible. There is a windstorm deductible, which is optional and applies to any windstorm loss, commonly running 1% to 5% of the value of the dwelling or the amount of insurance on the dwelling. And there is a hurricane deductible, usually mandated by the company, applying when a storm is declared a hurricane, also commonly 1% to 5%. Insurers in New York often require the hurricane deductible for properties in the five boroughs, in Nassau and Suffolk, and in coastal Westchester.

The percentage runs off the amount of insurance on the dwelling. It does not run off the size of the claim. That is the part people get wrong, and it is an expensive thing to get wrong.

Run a $12,000 roof loss through that table. Against the flat thousand, the insurer pays $11,000. Against a 5% deductible, the insurer pays nothing at all and the claim is closed without a check.

The Department uses its own example: a home insured for $150,000 with a mandatory 5% hurricane deductible leaves the owner responsible for the first $7,500 of a hurricane loss. It requires insurers to state that deductible as a dollar amount on the declarations page of any policy it is attached to, which is the single most useful sentence in this letter. The dollar figure is supposed to be there in print. You are not required to do the arithmetic yourself.

Two more mechanics decide whether the big deductible applies at all. In New York, a hurricane deductible is triggered only when the storm makes landfall in this state, and it applies to wind damage in a window that opens 12 hours before landfall and closes 12 hours after the last hurricane watch or warning for the state is canceled. Damage outside that window goes against the ordinary deductible.

Twenty-four days of telephone calls for a document I read in twenty minutes.

Friday morning, kitchen counter. The line I was looking for was two inches below the one I expected.

No hurricane deductible. No windstorm deductible either. Buffalo is a long way from a landfall, and I expected that part.

What the page does carry is an all-other-perils deductible of $2,500. I have been saying a thousand to anyone who asked, including twice in these letters. A thousand is what it was when I bought the policy. It became $2,500 at a renewal, and I cannot tell you which one, because the renewal notice went into the drawer with the others.

So: eleven letters about documents people sign and then stop reading, written by a woman who stopped reading hers. The fifteen hundred dollars is not the problem. The problem is that if a tree had come down in March I would have called my insurer and quoted a figure that was wrong by a factor of two and a half.

Your declarations page is one sheet. It takes four minutes. Look at the deductible line, and look at whether there is more than one.

Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey, 3 September 2026. Federal Reserve, 29 July 2026.

Some housekeeping, and I would rather say it plainly than bury it. A share of these letters has been landing in the spam folder instead of the inbox, and I found out from a reader rather than from my own checking. If this one reached you somewhere other than your main inbox, dragging it across is the thing that fixes it, and it fixes it for good. Adding the address to your contacts does the same job.

Tomorrow: the Annual Notice of Change, page by page. There are four numbers on the summary page and they are the ones worth an hour of your September.

Read the policy before you need it.
Rita