They bought the house on James Island in 2004, off Camp Road, for a number that now sounds like a joke. Two of them, both still working, one grown daughter, a twelve-year-old boat, and a small condo at Folly Beach they rent out in season. In 2019 they paid about $3,400 a year to insure all of it. This year the renewals added up to $9,800, and neither of them could have told you, under oath, what any of it actually covered.
Nobody reads a declarations page. Six policies across four carriers — homeowners, flood, the umbrella, two cars, the boat, the condo — arrived on five different renewal dates as 214 pages of endorsements, exclusions and sub-limits written in a language designed to be skimmed. They had been buying it the way most people do: renewing whatever arrived, calling an agent every few years when the number got frightening, and hoping. The AI Household Insurance Manager read all 214 pages, including the endorsements that modify the policy in ways the summary page does not mention.
Then it put the whole household on one page: what is covered, by which policy, to what limit, with what deductible, and what is specifically excluded. Two things came out of that immediately. The first was that the boat was insured twice — once properly, and once again under an endorsement on the homeowners policy that had been added in 2016 and never removed. The second was worse.
Their wind and hail deductible is 2 percent of the dwelling coverage, which they had always understood to be roughly $2,500. It is $11,400. That is not a coverage problem, it is a savings-account problem, and they had six years to plan for it and did not know. It found the gaps too.
The dock behind the house was covered by nothing at all — not the homeowners policy, which excludes it, and not the flood policy, which does not reach it. There was no sewer backup endorsement on a house four feet above a marsh. And the condo policy carried actual cash value on contents rather than replacement cost, which nobody had ever mentioned out loud. Then it made the renewals boring.
Sixty days before each one it assembles the shopping packet that lets agents quote the same risk instead of four different guesses: the elevation certificate, the roof's age with the permit date behind it, the wind mitigation features the house actually has, the full claims history, the current declarations. It tracks the mitigation credits available in this state for shutters and roof tie-downs, and it flagged that their elevation certificate had been sitting in a drawer since the survey and had never been given to the flood carrier at all. It does not tell them what to buy. It lays out what each option covers and what each one costs, including the deductible they would be carrying themselves, and they decide.
That distinction matters to them, and it is the reason they trust the table. It also got them ready to actually file one. Every June it prompts a walk through the house with a phone, room by room, and it turns that into a dated contents inventory with the serial numbers and the receipts it can match. It keeps the policies, the elevation certificate and the roof permit in one place that is not a filing cabinet on James Island.
If a claim ever happens, the documentation exists from before the storm rather than being reconstructed from memory afterward, which is the single thing adjusters here say separates a clean claim from a slow one. Handing the packet to three agents produced comparable quotes for the first time. They cut $2,240 a year without reducing a single limit, most of it from the duplicate boat coverage and a flood premium that fell once the elevation certificate finally reached the underwriter. They added the sewer backup endorsement and put the dock on a policy that covers it, which cost some of that back, on purpose.
And there is now $11,400 sitting in an account labeled with the deductible it is for.