Two hundred and eighty square feet

Good morning. I rang them on Monday at twenty past eight, standing at the counter with the kettle going, because I had worked out that if I sat down first I would find something else to do.

The woman I spoke to was called Denise and she was better at her job than I was expecting. Eleven minutes, no hold music, no transfer. I told her I thought my dwelling limit was out of date and asked what they had on file.

She read it back: $211,000, unchanged since the policy was written, no inflation guard endorsement on it. Then she offered to run their replacement cost estimate while I waited, which took her about four minutes.

Thirty-three thousand between their figure and my pencil, which on a national average against a specific house is not an alarming distance. I would have expected them to differ. I did not expect their number to be the lower one, because their number is supposed to be built from my actual house rather than from a percentage.

So I asked Denise for two things, and this is the part worth copying down.

A carrier's replacement cost figure comes out of an estimating tool, fed with what they hold about the property: square footage, construction type, number of rooms, finishes, anything recorded as an upgrade. The output is only as good as those inputs, and nobody checks the inputs unless somebody asks.

I asked for a copy of the calculation and a list of the data used to produce it. Both arrived by email on Tuesday afternoon. United Policyholders, the non-profit I mentioned a fortnight ago, recommends exactly this pair of requests, and I would say it is the single most useful thing in this letter.

The square footage they hold is 1,480. The house is 1,760. The difference is the back room, which was a screened porch when the policy was written in 2015 and has been a heated room with a proper floor since the spring of 2018.

I did that work. I have the permit. It never occurred to me to tell them, and there is no mechanism by which they would have found out.

Before I raised the square footage, she had already suggested an extended replacement cost endorsement, which raises the ceiling above the stated limit by a set percentage. The bands generally run from ten to fifty per cent depending on the carrier, and mine offers twenty and fifty.

Worth reading the terms on those before agreeing. The wording on the version I was sent asks the policyholder to insure to one hundred per cent of replacement cost as determined by the carrier, to accept their yearly adjustments to the limit, and to notify them within thirty days of any alteration that raises the replacement cost by five per cent or more.

Which is to say the endorsement I was being offered contains an obligation I had already been in breach of since 2018, in a policy I had not read, over a room I built myself.

She is rerunning the estimate with the corrected footage. It should be with me next week.

Freddie Mac PMMS, 3 Sep 2026. Federal Reserve, 29 Jul. BLS, 12 Aug.

Fourteen letters of saying I would make the call, and the call took eleven minutes and cost nothing. I have no explanation for that which reflects well on me.

What I did get right was the second question. Anybody can ring and be told a number. Asking for the calculation and the data behind it is what turned an eleven-minute call into a corrected file, and it is the part that people who do this professionally will tell you to do.

The limit is still $211,000 this morning. Nothing is fixed. But there is now a rerun in progress with the right square footage in it, and a permit from 2018 sitting on the table waiting to be scanned.

If you make the call, ask the second question. That is the whole of today's letter.