The Easiest Way to Cut Your Home Insurance Bills
Here's a simple way to potentially cut $150 from your annual insurance expenses: Raising your homeowners’ insurance deductible from $500 to $2,000 could lower your premiums by an average of 16 percent, according to a new report by InsuranceQuotes.com. Based on the average insurance premium of $978, that works out to more than $150 a year in savings.
Of course, that lower bill comes with some caveats. First, the amount you save could vary widely depending on where you live and other factors. In the new study, the savings from a higher deductible ranged from 41 percent for North Carolina homeowners to just 4 percent in Hawaii.
Second, a higher deductible means that you would be on the hook to pay more out of pocket before your insurance coverage kicks in if something happened to your home. Before making the switch, be sure you have enough money in your emergency savings to cover the total cost of the deductible.
“Consumers need to consider the bottom line before increasing deductibles,” Laura Adams, a senior analyst with InsuranceQuotes.com said in a statement. “While switching from a $500 deductible to a $5,000 deductible sounds appealing because it lowers home insurance premiums by an average of 28 percent, it could be a risky move for consumers who don’t maintain that much in savings.”
Related: The Best Time to Buy Car Insurance
Increasing a deductible from $500 to $1,000 resulted in an average savings of 6 percent nationally, ranging from 25 percent in North Caorlina to a low of 1 percent in Kentucky.
As your deductible gets higher, it may become less likely that you file a claim at all, since doing so will push your premium up. A separate analysis last fall by insuranceQuotes.com found that a single claim—even if it’s denied—can hike your homeowners’ insurance by an average of 9 percent a year, which can amount to hundreds of dollars.
Stat of the Day: 0.2%
The New York Times’ Jim Tankersley tweets: “In order to raise enough revenue to start paying down the debt, Trump would need tariffs to be ~4% of GDP. They're currently 0.2%.”
Read Tankersley’s full breakdown of why tariffs won’t come close to eliminating the deficit or paying down the national debt here.
Number of the Day: 44%
The “short-term” health plans the Trump administration is promoting as low-cost alternatives to Obamacare aren’t bound by the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to spend a substantial majority of their premium revenues on medical care. UnitedHealth is the largest seller of short-term plans, according to Axios, which provided this interesting detail on just how profitable this type of insurance can be: “United’s short-term plans paid out 44% of their premium revenues last year for medical care. ACA plans have to pay out at least 80%.”
Number of the Day: 4,229
The Washington Post’s Fact Checkers on Wednesday updated their database of false and misleading claims made by President Trump: “As of day 558, he’s made 4,229 Trumpian claims — an increase of 978 in just two months.”
The tally, which works out to an average of almost 7.6 false or misleading claims a day, includes 432 problematics statements on trade and 336 claims on taxes. “Eighty-eight times, he has made the false assertion that he passed the biggest tax cut in U.S. history,” the Post says.
Number of the Day: $3 Billion
A new analysis by the Department of Health and Human Services finds that Medicare’s prescription drug program could have saved almost $3 billion in 2016 if pharmacies dispensed generic drugs instead of their brand-name counterparts, Axios reports. “But the savings total is inflated a bit, which HHS admits, because it doesn’t include rebates that brand-name drug makers give to [pharmacy benefit managers] and health plans — and PBMs are known to play games with generic drugs to juice their profits.”
Chart of the Day: Public Spending on Job Programs
President Trump announced on Thursday the creation of a National Council for the American Worker, charged with developing “a national strategy for training and retraining workers for high-demand industries,” his daughter Ivanka wrote in The Wall Street Journal. A report from the president’s National Council on Economic Advisers earlier this week made it clear that the U.S. currently spends less public money on job programs than many other developed countries.
