My house is short by ninety thousand

Good morning. I have been putting off the arithmetic in this letter since the first one, and I did it on Wednesday evening with a pencil because I did not want a spreadsheet involved.

My dwelling limit is $211,000 and was set in 2019. That is the figure I have been referring to for two weeks without ever printing it, which I notice now was its own small act of avoidance.

Verisk runs a reconstruction cost analysis that tracks materials and retail labour, which is a narrower and more useful thing than general inflation. Its ten-year study, covering October 2014 to October 2024, put the national increase in residential reconstruction costs at 63.7 per cent.

Split into halves, the pattern is the part that matters to anyone with an old limit. From October 2014 to October 2019, costs rose 19.8 per cent nationally. From October 2019 to October 2024, they rose about 43 per cent, with states falling between 34 and 44.9 per cent. The annual average went from 4 per cent in the first period to 7.3 per cent in the second.

My limit was written at the hinge between those two.

Ninety thousand dollars is the gap on a national average applied to one house. It is also two years out of date, because the Verisk period ends in October 2024 and we are in September 2026, and reconstruction costs did not stop that month.

A national average describes nothing in particular. Reconstruction cost depends on what the house is made of, how it was built, what the local trades charge this year, and how many other roofs in the county need doing at the same time. Two houses on the same street can carry different figures for reasons visible only from a ladder.

What the arithmetic gives is a direction and a rough size, which is enough to tell me the conversation is worth having and not enough to tell me what to ask for. The number that would settle it comes from somebody walking the house with the current cost data in front of them.

I know that because it used to be my job, which makes the last two weeks harder to explain rather than easier.

Last Friday I said Regulation DD requires your bank to notify you at least thirty days before an automatically renewing certificate matures. That is one of two timings the rule permits, and I presented it as the only one.

The alternative lets a bank send the notice at least twenty days before the end of the grace period instead, provided the grace period runs at least five days. Both are lawful. If your notice arrived later than you expected, that may be why, and it does not mean anybody did anything wrong.

Freddie Mac PMMS, 3 Sep 2026. Federal Reserve, 29 Jul. BLS, 12 Aug. Reconstruction cost figures from Verisk 360Value ten-year analysis, Oct 2014 to Oct 2024.

Ten letters ago I opened by telling you that my dwelling limit had not moved since 2019 and that I had not fixed it. I did not have a figure then. I said I would keep mentioning the telephone call until I made it, and I have kept mentioning it, which was easier than the other half of the arrangement.

Now there is a pencil number on the back of an envelope and it is roughly ninety thousand dollars, national average, two years stale, on a house nobody has looked at. That is not an estimate. It is the thing that makes an estimate worth ordering.

Day fourteen. The policy copy is ten days out. Monday I will tell you what happened when I rang, because I am going to ring on Monday morning, and having now printed that sentence I have made it harder not to.