The renewal notice from Allstate came in late September, folded in with a credit card offer, and I almost recycled it unopened. Inside, the premium for the year starting November 1 was $1,927. Last year we paid $1,684. That's a 14 percent jump on a policy we've never filed a claim on, including in July, when a limb from our own maple came down on the back fence and we paid the $1,960 ourselves.
We'd been with Allstate since June 2019, when we bought this house. Back then I spent about ten minutes thinking about homeowners insurance, because I was packing boxes and assumed it was all more or less the same. This October I finally shopped it.
How we got the quotes
This time I went to an agent at an independent agency in town, which means she can quote several companies instead of just one, and I'm a little embarrassed it took a 14 percent increase for me to look for one. I called on a Monday, and she spent about forty minutes asking questions I had never really thought about. How old is the roof? Where's the oil tank, and is it in the basement or buried? Has the wiring been updated, and is anything original left? (Nate, who estimates electrical work for a living, answered that one in great detail.) Any claims in the last five years? A pool or a trampoline?
Between October 13 and 17 we lined up four numbers. The agent ran Travelers and NYCM, I got a Liberty Mutual quote online myself so I'd have one direct comparison, and the fourth was the Allstate renewal. She set the coverage as close to identical as she could across all of them.
- Allstate renewal: $1,927, with a $1,000 deductible
- Liberty Mutual: $1,880
- Travelers: $1,742
- NYCM: $1,598 with a $1,000 deductible, or $1,436 with a $2,500 deductible
NYCM is a regional company that only writes policies in New York, and I'd honestly never heard of it before this month. That gave me pause. Our agent said they've been around a long time and that her clients' claims had gone smoothly, but that's one person's experience, and I have no claim of my own to judge them by. To be fair to Allstate, we never had a problem with them either. We just never tested them.
The dwelling coverage surprise
The most useful thing the agent did had nothing to do with price. She looked at our dwelling coverage, $412,000, and asked how it had been set. I had no idea. She explained that it's meant to cover rebuilding the house, not what it would sell for, and that rebuilding a 1924 house with plaster walls, old trim and a deep covered porch can cost more than people expect. NYCM's replacement-cost estimate came to $438,000, so we raised it. The NYCM numbers above already include the higher coverage, which made them look even better next to the others.
Why we took the higher deductible
We chose NYCM with the $2,500 deductible, at $1,436 a year, starting November 1. That's $491 less than the Allstate renewal and $248 less than we paid last year, with more dwelling coverage.
The deductible was the real decision. Going from $1,000 to $2,500 saves $162 a year with NYCM, and it also means that if something happens, we pay the first $2,500 instead of the first $1,000. A few things tipped it for us. We keep a separate savings account we call the house fund, and it can absorb $2,500 without wrecking anything. The limb in July showed us we'd probably pay for a small or medium mess ourselves anyway; our Allstate agent explained then that on our old policy, a claim not far over the deductible could easily cost us more at renewal than it paid out. And at $162 a year, the savings cover the extra $1,500 of risk in a little over nine claim-free years. For our house and our savings, that felt like a reasonable bet. For a family without that cushion, it could be a bad one.
The agent also quoted a bundle with our car insurance, but our two cars are with GEICO, and nothing she put together beat keeping GEICO and taking NYCM for the house alone. So the cars stay put.
What I wish I'd asked in 2019
How was the dwelling coverage figured, and is it based on the cost to rebuild? What does each deductible option cost and save per year, in actual dollars? How does this company treat small claims at renewal? And when did anyone last compare this policy against others? That last one was on me.
I'm an art teacher, not an insurance person, and all of this is just what our agent walked us through for our house and our budget. A licensed agent can go through your own policy line by line, and that's who I'd ask. The new policy starts November 1, and the Allstate notice, its envelope gone soft and coffee-ringed after three weeks on the kitchen table, has finally made it to the recycling bin.
