Home Insurance Costs Hit America’s Heartland the Hardest
Insurance eats up 7% of median household income in places like eastern Kentucky.
Photographer: Seth Herald/AFP/Getty Images
Financial experts say you shouldn’t spend more than a quarter of your income on housing. This gets trickier when the cost of insuring that housing against being burned down or ruined in a flood or storm keeps rising.
Americans in several counties are paying more than 7% of their household income on home insurance alone, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence study. Many of these counties are in places you would expect, such as coastal Florida and California fire country, which are on the front lines of an attritional war against an increasingly dangerous climate. But many more are scattered across vast swaths of the Midwest and South, making it clear this is a national economic problem.