"What kind of dog is he?" That was the agent's third question, right after the age of the roof and right before the age of the electrical panel. I said yellow Lab and shepherd mix, about 70 pounds, afraid of the shop vac. The agent typed for a second and said the last part wouldn't affect anything.
After our State Farm renewal jumped 18 percent in April, from $1,284 to $1,512 with no claims and no changes, we decided to have someone shop it. Gary and Linda have used the same independent agency for years, the kind that can quote several insurance companies at once, so I called them on a Friday morning and spent forty minutes answering questions about the Cape.
What the agent asked
I'd expected square footage and the year the house was built. I hadn't expected how much they'd care about the systems. The questions, roughly in order:
- Roof age and type. Architectural shingles from 2013.
- Electrical. A 100-amp Square D breaker panel from the late eighties, no fuses, a few older two-wire outlets upstairs.
- Plumbing. Mostly copper, plus one old galvanized line to the kitchen that we're replacing next month.
- Heating. A 1998 gas furnace.
- Sump pump. Yes, from 2009, with no battery backup.
- Claims in the last five years. None.
- Dog breed, any bite history. Moose, and no.
A week later the agent emailed four quotes, and the next evening Tessa and I spread them out on the kitchen table next to the house sheet.
The four numbers
All of these were yearly premiums for the same house:
- Auto-Owners: $1,148 with a $2,500 deductible, including $10,000 of water backup coverage, which was about $68 of that price. The same policy with a $1,000 deductible was $1,321.
- Frankenmuth: $1,236 with a $2,500 deductible.
- Citizens: $1,402 with a $1,000 deductible.
- State Farm, our renewal: $1,512 with a $1,000 deductible and no water backup coverage.
Once I lined them up, most of the pages read the same. The differences that mattered to us came down to three lines: the deductible, whether water backup coverage was included, and the dwelling coverage amount, meaning what the policy would pay to rebuild the house. The dwelling numbers weren't identical at first, so I asked the agent to put them on the same footing, so I wasn't comparing a cheaper policy that simply covered less. The Auto-Owners quote landed at $281,000 of dwelling coverage.
The deductible question
This was the part we argued about, in a friendly way. Going from a $1,000 to a $2,500 deductible on the Auto-Owners policy saved $173 a year. In exchange, any claim would cost us $1,500 more out of pocket before insurance paid anything.
If you never file a claim, the higher deductible wins every year. If you file one, it takes about eight and a half claim-free years of savings to make up that extra $1,500. We've owned the house for 14 months and haven't filed anything, but that's a small sample.
What decided it for us was a question the agent asked back: could we write a $2,500 check tomorrow without it becoming a crisis? We could, from our emergency fund. That's separate from the new house fund, which is only two months old. Tessa's condition was clear: "The $2,500 deductible, as long as the emergency fund never drops below $2,500." I wrote that rule at the top of the insurance tab.
The higher deductible also means we're effectively our own insurance for anything small. A $1,800 mess would be entirely ours. We were already treating it that way, honestly, since I'd be nervous about filing a small claim and watching the next renewal climb.
What we picked
We went with Auto-Owners at the $2,500 deductible with the $10,000 water backup endorsement, starting July 1. I'll write a separate post about the water backup piece, because it's the part I thought about most.
We moved the cars too. The auto side drops from $2,184 a year to $1,968, a nice extra but not why we switched. The agency sent the new declarations page to our mortgage servicer so escrow pays the new policy. State Farm should refund the unused months of the April renewal, which the agent estimated at about $1,180, and since escrow paid the premium, that refund goes back to the servicer, not to us.
I want to be careful about one thing. This is what fit our house, our dog and our savings, at prices quoted in June 2025. Two neighbors on our block could get completely different numbers for nearly identical houses. If you're in the same spot, your own agent is the person to walk through it with, not a guy with a spreadsheet.
The new policy takes effect in eight days. I've added a reminder to the house sheet for May 2026 to look at the renewal before it pays itself out of escrow, which is the step I skipped this year.
