The deductible is what you pay before the insurance company will start paying your claim if you have a loss. The deductible only comes into play if you are the injured party. You do not have to pay a deductible for a liability claim. That is not always true if you have a commercial liability policy. I should also mention that since Katrina there are some insurance companies that have two deductibles on their homeowners’ policies: 1) Wind/Hail deductible; 2) Deductible for everything else. Let me take a second of your time to let you know how having two deductibles on your policy works. Let’s say you have a Wind/Hail Deductible of $10 and the other Deductible is an additional $10 (You thought that I did not have a sense of humor-$10 (LOL)). If lightning hit your home and a fire burned your house down, your deductible to would be $10. If there was a windstorm that blew off a portion of your roof and water seeped into your home through the hole that the roof now has in it. Your full deductible would be $20 because the leading cause of the loss was the windstorm, so you would have to pay both deductibles.