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The author, Mandy Shunnarah.
Mandy Shunnarah
My last apartment leaked badly whenever it rained.
When my partner and I finally moved, we found an amazing home — but the roof was 25 years old.
It leaked within six months, but our homeowners insurance covered the bulk of the bill.
After 13 months of living in an apartment where black mold grew on the ceiling and rivulets of water poured down the walls of the bedroom, kitchen, and closet every time it rained, we’d had enough. Falling asleep to the pitter-patter of rain hitting the carpet gets old pretty quickly.
My partner and I were 26 in early 2017 and didn’t feel ready to buy a house on our meager salaries — he was a journalist and I was a customer service rep. But his last apartment had relentless drain flies and my last apartment hadn’t been renovated since the ’70s.
Both had their fair share of strange and noisy neighbors, including a guy who sold steaks of questionable quality and origin from a chest freezer in the back of his pickup truck whom we called Meat Man.
We were ready for something new, a place that was ours.
We found a great house, but its roof was ancient
We found a small, Cape Cod-style house in Columbus, Ohio, built in 1946 for a soldier returning from World War II and his family. That soldier’s son, now an old man, is who we bought the house from. It had been lovingly tended; the inspector even said he’d never seen a house this old in this good shape.
But the roof was over 25 years old. At the time we bought the house, it wasn’t leaking, but we knew we’d have to replace it at some point in the next couple of years. We were hoping to wait because, as first-time homebuyers, we didn’t even have 20% for the down payment (thank you, PMI!) and between trying to cobble together as much as we could for that, plus moving expenses, plus all those little expenses that go into making a place liveable (curtains, so many curtains), our savings was emptied.
Six months later, we noticed that familiar wet spot on the ceiling of our bedroom. We felt cursed.
We put the new roof on our credit card and hoped our insurance would cover it
Since we were beyond fed up with leaking roofs, we opted to have the entire thing replaced rather than just have that one spot repaired. No point in a bandaid if the bone needs to be reset. The cost to replace the roof on our 1,012-square-foot house was $5,720, which we initially had to pay in full while waiting to see what we might get reimbursed from our homeowners insurance.
It was a stressful month of waiting, but in the end, Farmers homeowners insurance saved our tails — and our sanity. They reimbursed us $4,430, so we only ended up having to pay $1,290 out of pocket. A brand-new roof for less than $1,300 isn’t bad!
If Farmers hadn’t reimbursed us as much as they did, who knows when we would’ve been able to pay off that expense. And if they hadn’t reimbursed us so quickly, we definitely would have had to pay interest on what was already a larger-than-normal credit card balance.
I also appreciated that Farmers didn’t try to fight us on the roofer we chose. I’d heard stories about insurance companies requiring customers to choose from a specific pool of contractors, likely to manage the cost of the payout for the insurance company. It’s important to my partner and me that we keep our dollars local, so we were able to choose a roofer that came highly recommended by our neighbors and who was based just two miles away.
Even though paperwork and anything that could be called bureaucracy normally stresses me out, the process of filing a claim was straightforward. We filled out a form online and briefly spoke to an agent over the phone and that was it. I was expecting more hoops and was delighted that we didn’t have to jump through many.
Our premium has only gone up slightly since the roof replacement
Our annual premium in 2017, when we first got the house and filed the claim for the roof, was $578.31, in part because we’d just gotten homeowners insurance and were receiving a “claim-free discount.”
In 2018, the next renewal following the roof replacement claim, our premium went up to $660.83 since we lost the claim-free discount. We expected as much but hoped they wouldn’t hold the increase over us for too long. In 2019, the claim-free discount was back in effect but our premium was $673.67.
In 2020, I added home-based business insurance to our homeowner’s insurance to cover the inventory for the Etsy vintage shop I run out of my guest room, and that additional coverage, surprisingly, reduced our premium to $645 for 2021.
In 2022, our premium jumped to $677, perhaps due to inflation and the rising costs of, well, everything. However, there was a note on our policy documents that said we’d nearly been five years claim-free, having not had anything go wrong since the roof replacement, so we’re due for a “claim forgiveness discount” for 2023, which “prevents your premium from increasing as a result of your next claim after your policy has been in force for five years without a claim.”
Thankfully, there’s no cap on the number of claims that can be filed within a set period of time, so if we have a stressful year where the house falls apart, I’ll feel better knowing that filing insurance claims won’t add too much to that stress.