Should I buy an extended warranty or save the money?
Deciding on an extended warranty requires weighing high upfront prices against the risk of paying full cost if an appliance breaks. While saving the warranty fee in a high-yield account earns interest, that small gain will not cover a total breakdown. Buyers often remain stuck because they also do not know what dealing with third-party warranty companies is actually like.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Skipping the extended warranty or questioning the high price quoted by the contractor
- 2Self-insuring by putting the equivalent warranty cost into a high-yield savings account for future repairs
- 3Making the purchase with a credit card that offers a free extended warranty as a built-in benefit
- 4Buying appliances from Costco to utilize their automatic warranty doubling and Assurance plans
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“My contractor quoted $2600 for a 10 year labor, including refrigerant. I think a labor warranty would be good to have but price seems high and not sure how dealing with these warranty companies is.”source ↗
“Im buying a fridge from bestbuy. 3 year warranty is 160 and 5 year warranty is 350. We just build a brand new house and will be purchasing more appliances too. Is there some 3rd party website that covers all appliances warranties ? Or anything else that you call can recommend?”source ↗
“If you put $2,000 into a HYSA once and leave it there for 5 years at 4% APY on an average i assume $2,000 × (1.04)⁵ ≈ $2,433.31. So i gained 433$ after full 5 years. But what if fridge is broken within the 5 years. I have to sacrifice full cost of fridge right where an additional warranty would have helped?”source ↗
“How does saving $160 over 3 years against a savings account and risk $2k purchase? Just curious how”source ↗
Where this came up
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