Choosing the right coverage doesn’t have to be a gamble.

If you find shopping for home insurance overwhelming, don’t worry. That’s where we help!

The best way is to start one line at a time. While you may want to start at price, we’ll save that for later.

Everything in this example is actual quotes from a real home in Indiana.

Step 1: Insured Value

This is how much the home will be insured for. We estimate the home should be insured for around $750,000.

Given that, the quotes from State Farm and Hippo are inadequate and we suggest you rule those out.

Step 2: Deductible

Next, you should compare deductibles. Higher deductibles lower your premium but mean you have a higher co-pay if there is a claim.

You should ask for quotes with the same deductible to make them easier to compare.

The one outlier in our sample is State Farm which has a high deductible that explains part of why its quote is so low. However, we already eliminated them so you can move forward with the others.

Step 3: Other coverages

Most of the other coverages like personal property, other structures, or liability will not make significant differences in your price. What’s important here is to make sure you have the right amount of coverage.

All of the personal property amounts are pretty high so they offer more than enough coverage.

On the other hand, the liability is on the low end at either $100,000 or $300,000 and you might want to increase those.

You don’t need to eliminate any company for low liability though as it is easy to ask them to add more coverage.

Step 4: Price

Now we can look at price! Allstate and Farmers are very high, so we can eliminate them.

That leaves us with three finalists.

Step 5: The Decision

We have three quotes left - Progressive, Lemonade, and Liberty. Progressive is the cheapest, so should you take it?

Let’s review it more closely. The deductible is the same for all three. Both Progressive and Liberty have $300K of Liability so that’s good.

On the other hand, Progressive has lower insured value and personal property. Is that a problem?

It could be, but in this case, the $849,000 should be more than sufficient.

If Liberty had quoted a lower insured value, they probably would have beaten Progressive’s price, but as the Liberty commercial says - only pay for what you need and you don’t need to insure this home for $1.3M.

So Progressive is the best quote of the seven.

Step 6: Final Improvements

Before you agree to the Progressive quote, you should do one more thing. Ask to see how the quote changes if you picked a higher deductible or wanted more liability coverage.

A few changes would save an additional $500. Want to see how?

Raising your deductible from $1000 to $5000 would save $400. While this does mean you would pay $4000 more if you had a claim, you would save $4000 of premium over ten years.

The math suggests you have > 50% chance of no claims in ten years which would make that free money. If you do have one claim in that time, you would still break even. You only lose if you are in the ~12% of homeowners who have two claims over ten years.

How else can you save? If you don’t think you need quite so much personal property coverage, you can save over $100 by cutting that in half to $212,250.

Combined, these two changes would save you $510. What about your liability? Guess what? It only costs $10 to raise that to $500,000!