The Story
Picture a homeowner who has just been told their roof needs replacing after a hail event. Twenty-two thousand dollars of work. They've paid their premiums for eleven years without a single claim.
They call to file, and learn their deductible is not the one-thousand dollars they remembered. It's two percent — and two percent is calculated on the insured value of the house, not on the size of the loss.
On a home insured for four hundred thousand dollars, that deductible is eight thousand dollars.
Nothing here is a scam. It's all in the policy. It just wasn't in their head.
The Mechanism
Texas homeowner policies commonly carry a separate wind-and-hail deductible, and it is frequently expressed as a percentage rather than a dollar figure. The percentage applies to Coverage A — the dwelling limit — not to the claim.
The arithmetic, on a home insured at $400,000:
1% ...... $4,000 2% ...... $8,000 5% ..... $20,000
And your everyday deductible for a burst pipe or a kitchen fire might still be $1,000. Two different numbers, in the same policy, for different perils.
The consequences run in both directions, and both are worth understanding:
- A percentage deductible lowers your premium. That is why it's there, and for some households that trade is genuinely the right one.
- It also raises the threshold at which a claim is worth filing at all. Pair a 2% deductible with ACV roof settlement from the last issue and a mid-sized hail loss can produce a payment near zero — while still going on your claims history.
That last point is the one that catches people. A claim that pays nothing is still a claim on your record.
The Opportunity That Comes To You
Your declarations page again. One page, two minutes.
- Find the wind/hail deductible. Percentage or flat dollars?
- If it's a percentage, multiply it by your Coverage A limit. Write the actual dollar figure somewhere you'll find it. Most people have never once seen this number expressed in dollars, which is precisely why it surprises them.
- Check whether your dwelling limit has been rising automatically each renewal, as many policies do to track construction costs. If it has, your percentage deductible has been quietly growing with it.
Then ask your agent what a flat deductible or a lower percentage would cost. You may decide the savings are worth it. You may not. Either way you'll have chosen it, rather than discovered it.
The Opportunity You Create
There's a decision hiding underneath all this that only you can make, and it's the reason this issue exists.
Once you know your real deductible in dollars, you know the threshold below which insurance is not going to be the answer — and above which the condition of your roof, documented, is doing serious financial work.
Homeowners who know that number behave differently. They maintain rather than wait. They document rather than hope. They stop treating the policy as a plan and start treating it as a backstop with a price on it.
That reframe is worth more than any single deduction in this newsletter.
Next issue: why your mortgage payment went up when your interest rate didn't.
The free inspection: 45 minutes at your home, full timestamped and geotagged photo survey, matched to the NOAA hail record for your ZIP, written report emailed to you and yours permanently. No cost, no obligation, and we don't file or handle insurance claims — we document, you decide.
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