Is home appliance repair insurance worth it?

[PlanetJosh]

And you can throw in car repair insurance too if your car warranty expired or you never had one. So back to the home repair insurance thing. Some of these ads on tv even claim if your freezer/fridge breaks down they'll even pay you for the cost of all your spoiled food as well as paying for the repairs.

Never had this insurance or the car one and my Chevy Cobalt warranty ran out years ago. Well I'm lucky enough to have a very low maintenance car. So what's up with the home repair insurance for appliances and even home computers for anyone who has it or is thinking about it?

 

[highland145]

CSR had a home one. Replaced her microwave. Dicked her around for a year on the hvac. Woot, summer in the South with no air.


Look at the reviews but, No.

 

[RLGL]

NO, one is better to save the cost of the premium each month in a savings account !!!!

 

[nutxo]

nope.

Its a fucking scam.

 

[OccamsToothbrush]

Insurance is always a bad bet. The insurer knows exactly how many claims they'll have to pay out and the average cost of the work and prices the plans accordingly so that THEY make maximum profit. It's possible that you'd be in the small percentage of people who would recoup more than they spend, but it's very unlikely. The only time to buy insurance is if the possible hit (home fire, catastrophic car accident, etc) is more than you could afford to pay out. For things that most people can pay for out of pocket, like home appliances, it's silly to take out insurance or extended warranties.

 

[Red Squirrel]

No, think about how much you'll be paying per month, vs how often you even need to fix something and how much it will cost?

Better just pay a one time cost to fix something when needed than to pay monthly.

 

[deadlyapp]

I got a home warranty on my house when I bought it - simply thrown into the purchase price as a standard negotiation. I could have possibly dropped the price of the house by about 500 (the value of the warranty) but we had already bargained pretty hard.

So far it's helped resolve an oven issue that we had, but we did end up having to pay for the service tech to come out anyways, so it would have likely been about the same. For a lot of stuff that is easy to resolve I would never bother filing a claim (eg our kitchen faucet is loose and I'll just fix that myself when I have time).

For new appliance purchases, especially big ones, I generally purchase the extended warranties. Most of them include a yearly maintenance visit and I've seen enough mainboards go bad on new fridges, washer/dryers, etc, to throw down the extra 300-400 for 3-5 years of service.

 

[ultimatebob]

The only way I could see those home warranties working is if you found a way to "scam the scammers", like if you bought broken appliances, made them fix them under their "warranty" and then resold them as refurbished.

 

[Azurik]

Besides home/rental/auto insurance, the only worthwhile insurance is Term Life.

 

[KB]

Nope. Friend had one when they bought their house. Took two weeks in 90 plus degree temperatures to get AC fixed. Had they paid it themselves it would have been fixed in about one day.

I had car dent insurance on my new car. Tree branch fell on car, dented it and they refused coverage because it was too hard to fix.

 

[Red Squirrel]

That's the other thing too, the service is often worse than if you had to pay.

My sister got suckered into a furnace rental. It broke down in middle of January but they said they could only go look at it in a few days. A few days in January is NOT acceptable for a furnace repair. I went over to look at it hoping it would be something simple but it was the weirdest furnace I ever worked on so after poking around a little bit I decided not to venture further given it was a rental. I had forgotten that they do have a fireplace so at least they had some heat. If it was an owned service pretty much any hvac company has a 24/7 service. You will pay for that, but in the end you still save by not renting or paying for any kind of insurance.

 

[s0me0nesmind1]

Insurance, AS A GENERAL PURPOSE - Is meant to take more money than distribute. Any and all insurance should be avoided where possible.

The obvious exceptions: Car insurance (legal requirement), and home insurance (legal requirement for mortgages - and overall not a bad idea unless you have your home value in cash).

Aside from that... "extended warranties", etc... are all bullshit. Their exclusions list is riduclous. Don't fall into such traps. Instead, use what money you WOULD be paying and put it in a savings account. I guarantee you it will grow far more faster than the "warranty" or "insurance" bullshit will.

 

[Mai72]

I don't think so. Seems that most things are disposable anymore.