In most cases, lowering your home insurance premium directly affects your monthly mortgage payment. If you have a mortgage on your home currently, chances are you escrow your home insurance into your monthly payment. In doing this, it is often out of sight, out of mind for many customers, but with a few swift moves, you can keep those home insurance premiums in check. Here are some tips for doing so:

  1. Have Your Agent Run a New Cost Estimator: When quoting home insurance, each insurance carrier uses their own cost estimation method to determine how much to insure a home for replacement cost. After the policy is issued, each year it renews this dwelling amount may be increased to guard against inflation. That said, often times as the years go by it raises dramatically. At 5% or 10% a year on a $500,000 dollar home this quickly builds and costs the homeowner without them even thinking about it. If you’ve been in your home for 5+ years have your agent run a new cost evaluation.
  2. Lower Your Personal Property Coverage: Personal property coverage is most often calculated as a percentage of the dwelling amount. Using our $500,000 home example, let’s say a company’s standard is to give 80% of that value for personal property, or contents. For the average person this is WAY too much coverage. Did you know that you have the authority to lower this and save money? With that said, each insurance company files differently in each state, so there’s a minimum they can decrease it. For most of our companies the minimum is 60% of the dwelling amount. But in our example, this $100K less coverage in property saves real dollars every year for the customer.
  3. Raise Your Deductible: Gone are the days of the $500 home deductible and insurance companies know this. What home insurance claims happen anymore that cost less than $1000 dollars anyway? Raising your deductible to $1500 or even $2500 can pay for itself in just a few years with the annual cost savings. This can seriously help your cause in lowering your home insurance cost.

We hope you enjoyed and will use these tips in lowering your home insurance premiums. Feel free to reach out to our agency if you need help in reviewing your current coverage. Remember, we’re licensed in: Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Texas. We insure homes in all of these states and can help you with your needs!