The 7% mortgage is the smallest news this week

Good morning. I read two weeks of news at the kitchen table on Tuesday night with the radio on. Somewhere around the heating oil story I stopped ranking it by importance and began sorting it by where each item would land in a house like mine.

So this is a new thing for some Wednesdays. There are nine items in four piles, and the last pile holds the one I could not place.

Denise's recalculation has not come. I said it would go first if it did, so this is the spot it would have taken.

Connecticut's energy department put home heating oil at an average of $5.91 a gallon in its survey last week, against $3.95 in late June. AAA recorded a national diesel record of $6.53 the same week, and the two fuels are close cousins at the refinery.

My brother heats with oil and has not signed anything with his dealer yet. I have not told him what to do. I also still have not asked him about our father's rifle, which is a separate drawer.

Freddie Mac's weekly average for a 30-year fixed loan reached 7.03% on September 24, the first reading above 7% since January 2025. If your rate is fixed, this changes nothing on your statement.

ICE's September mortgage report puts the average property insurance payment for a homeowner with a mortgage at $209 a month in the second quarter of 2026. Those who changed carriers over the past year cut their payments by 6.6% on average. The figure is national, and it says nothing about what the new policies cover.

I have never switched, and I have not checked what my own premium did this year.

The adjustment for 2027 comes out after the September inflation numbers. Advocacy groups have published estimates in the mid-3% range. I am not adding a guess of my own.

The Medicare trustees' June report projected the standard 2027 Part B premium at $209.50 a month, up from $202.90 in 2026. CMS usually confirms the real figure in November, and some private forecasters budget higher because the trustees have come in low before.

CMS finalized both numbers in the spring, and I had not noticed until this week. The most anyone pays out of pocket for covered drugs in a Part D plan goes from $2,100 to $2,400 in January 2027, and the standard deductible from $615 to $700.

Congress cleared a stopgap funding bill at the start of September, so nothing shuts down at midnight tonight. The stopgap runs to December 11, and the National Flood Insurance Program's authority expires that same day. In past lapses, new and renewal flood policies could not be written until Congress acted, and home sales in flood zones waited.

California's insurance commissioner reminded people last week that flood coverage generally starts 30 days after it is bought.

A New Jersey assemblyman introduced a bill on September 14 that would bar insurers from letting artificial intelligence make the final decision to deny a homeowners, auto or flood claim. It has not been sent to committee, and there is no Senate version.

I left my job in 2023 when the company moved to estimating from photographs, so I read the bill twice.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the average price of electricity in U.S. cities at 19.6 cents a kilowatt-hour in August 2026. I tried to work out what that means for one loaf from my bread machine, which dates from 2004, and found the manual does not list its wattage.

After sorting the piles, I would move my own insurance renewal onto the kitchen table ahead of the oil. I am not sure of that order. The bread machine stays in the last pile.

The piles are still on the table this morning, and the radio is on again. Tomorrow is a short one, from a job I went out on this month.

Read the policy before you need it. — Rita