The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: alpharomeo on July 22, 2013, 10:19:07 PM
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I am curious how everyone feels about the different home warranty programs that are offered. I currently don't have one and I am guessing the mustachian answer is to "self insure", but I wanted to see others' take as they seem to be pretty popular.
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Never heard of them, which makes me think that some entrepreneur has invented yet another way to make people feel nervous so that he/she can sell them stuff they never needed before.
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My seller paid for one as part of our house purchase. I won't renew it when it expires. Its quite a racket, honestly. If you call anyone out for any reason, its $60 out of your pocket to pay the contractor. It seems that the contractor's job is to then figure out how its not covered under the insurance contract, but *since* he's already there, and you've already invested $60, he can take care of it for another $50/$100 or whatever.
I suppose maybe if your air conditioner completely dies, or something like that, it may be worth it but from my experience, I'm not impressed. How many years can you pay them $400 a year for home warranty stuff, before you could have just bought a new air conditioner?
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We asked for it when we bought our house
Ours was a foreclosure and we had to buy as is
Seller paid for it
We knew it would be better to self insure, but we
wanted to have the peace of mind during the first
year, when you have all the moving expenses etc.
so if something big broke on top of things we just
wanted it covered.
Once the year was up, we did not renew. They sent us
letter after letter, trying to make us believe, we just need
to fork over more money, but we had made sure we could
cancel after the year.
So be sure to not fall into the trap, where they just send you
an invoice, hoping you are stupid enough to just buy it ;)