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By Sara Anglin - State Farm Insurance Agent
The Deductible You Picked Once and Forgot Was Even a Choice You signed up for auto or home coverage a while back, clicked through the numbers, picked a ...
You signed up for auto or home coverage a while back, clicked through the numbers, picked a deductible that made sense at the time, and moved on with your life. That's exactly how it's supposed to go. Nobody keeps a running mental note of "my collision deductible is $500" the way they remember a password or a birthday. But that one number, chosen once, quietly shapes what you pay every month and what you'd owe if a tree limb comes down on your Highland Park roof or someone taps your bumper on West End.
So it's worth pulling that number back into the light and asking whether it still fits the life you have now, which is probably not the exact life you had when you picked it.
A deductible is the part of a covered loss you pay before your policy kicks in. If your home deductible is $1,000 and a hailstorm does $8,000 of damage, you cover the first $1,000 and your coverage handles the rest, subject to your policy terms. Simple enough on paper.
Here's the part that gets forgotten: the deductible and the premium move in opposite directions. Choose a higher deductible and your monthly premium generally goes down, because you've agreed to shoulder more of a smaller loss yourself. Choose a lower deductible and the premium goes up, because your policy is stepping in sooner. You're not saving money or losing money with either choice. You're deciding when the money leaves your pocket, spread out in premiums or in one lump at claim time.
That's the trade. The right answer depends entirely on your situation, and your situation has almost certainly shifted since you first made the pick.
Think about who you were when you set it. Maybe you were a young professional in a rented apartment in East Nashville, cash flow tight, so a low deductible felt safer... you didn't want a surprise bill you couldn't absorb. Fair. That was the right instinct for that moment.
Now maybe you've bought a house, built up some savings, and you've got a cushion in the bank you didn't have before. If you could comfortably cover a $2,500 loss without it wrecking your month, keeping a $500 deductible means you're paying extra in premium every year to protect against a bill you could already handle. That premium difference is money that could stay with you.
The reverse happens too. A high deductible you picked when you had a healthy emergency fund can feel very different after a big expense drains it. If a $2,500 out of pocket would genuinely sting right now, a lower deductible and a slightly higher premium buys you real peace of mind, and that's a legitimate reason to move it back down.
The honest test is one question you can answer at your kitchen table: if a covered loss happened tomorrow, what dollar amount could you pay out of your own account without it becoming a problem? That number is your deductible answer. It has nothing to do with what felt right three or five years ago.
People sometimes assume their car and their house work the same way here. They don't, quite.
On auto, your collision and comprehensive coverages each carry their own deductible, and they tend to come in clean tiers like $250, $500, or $1,000. Comprehensive covers the stuff that isn't a crash... a windshield cracked by gravel on I-40, hail, theft, hitting a deer out toward the county line. It's worth looking at those two deductibles separately, because your risk of each is different.
On home, Tennessee sits in a stretch of the country that sees real hail and wind, and many homeowners policies now carry a separate deductible for wind and hail damage. Sometimes that one is a flat dollar amount, sometimes it's a percentage of your home's insured value, which can land higher than you'd expect on a bigger house. If you've never checked which type yours is, that's the single most useful thing you can pull up on your declarations page. The Insurance Information Institute has a plain-language rundown of how homeowners deductibles work, including the percentage kind, if you want to read up before we talk.
It's tempting to bump your deductible as high as it'll go just to shrink the premium. And in the right circumstances, that's a smart move. But the goal isn't the lowest possible bill. The goal is a deductible you'd actually be relieved to see if a claim came in, not one that makes you hesitate to file at all.
There's also a quieter benefit to getting this right that has nothing to do with dollars: clarity. When you know exactly what you'd owe on a claim, a fender bender in the Kroger lot or a limb through the gutter stops being a mystery. You already know your number. That calm is worth something on its own.
When you sit down with us, adjusting a deductible isn't a form you fill out alone hoping you guessed right. We look at the whole picture through your Personal Price Plan: what you drive, what your home is worth to rebuild, what you've got set aside, and how a change to one deductible ripples into your premium. Then we run the actual numbers side by side, so you can see the monthly difference against the out-of-pocket difference and decide with real figures in front of you instead of a hunch.
Sometimes the answer is to leave it exactly where it is, and that's a fine answer too. The point is that it becomes a choice again, made on purpose, by the person you are now.
If it's been a couple of years since anyone asked you what deductible you'd actually be comfortable paying, that's reason enough to give us a call. It's a short conversation, and you'll walk away knowing your number instead of guessing at it.