My syndicated Super-Couponing Tips column for the week is entitled “Is buying the extended warranty worth it?.”
Here’s an excerpt:
“Our 2-1/2-year-old washer and dryer are no longer under warranty. The store sent us the opportunity to extend the warranty on the dryer only, but it costs $70 per year, which seems really high to me.”
Read this entire column at the Napa Valley Register.
My Super-Couponing Tips column appears in newspapers around the country to a weekly readership of over 20 million people! Learn more about my column’s syndication at this link.
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J.R. says
$70 a year seems more like a service contract rather than an extended warranty. But it definitely seems overpriced.
Extended warranties & service contracts on just about everything from cars to appliances to consumer electronics are rip-offs! They are big profit items for whoever is selling the warranty, and often provide little if any actual coverage. If you read them carefully, I’ve seen some limit coverage to what you paid for the warranty!
Last time I got the hard sell from a car dealer on an extended warranty my response was something like “If this car is that bad, maybe I just shouldn’t be buying this car”. That usually shuts them up. Any more crap, and I walk out and shop elsewhere.
When they ask you at the register, they are going after the quick impulse buy purchase, when you don’t have time to think it out. That’s always a bad time to be making a financial decision.
As Jill suggested, you are better off saving the money, and putting it towards the eventual repairs, or replacement.
We’ve got an old Maytag washer and dryer. Over 35 years! I won’t replace them because nothing made today will last that long! In the past 2 decades we’ve had ONE $200 service call on the washer. Plus a couple very minor things on each that I was able to fix. Belts, and a little plastic part on the washer. I can’t remember past that, may have had the gas valve on the dryer replaced once, and the water valve on the washer. I don’t touch anything involving the gas line, but am handy enough to do most common things myself.
I’ve made 2 exceptions to this rule:
When our daughter went to college we got her a brand new expensive laptop computer. Got the extended warranty package with that. If she had been at home where I could have helped out, we might not have spent the extra. 2 things got replaced that were really due to her abuse that the regular warranty wouldn’t have covered. Then she spilled something on the computer! They replaced almost everything inside the box.
The other is tires. Ever since moving out to the far suburbs, we trash tires constantly. Potholes, road hazards, and who knows what. Except for the recent set we bought on one car, we’ve replaced at least one tire of every set we’ve bought under the road hazard warranty. On the old minivan we replaced all four, one at a time!