We have a home in the sf bay area, california.
Need recommendations of good home warranty companies.
I have heard of scams and horror stories. Some have said that it is not worth the money.
Any suggestions, pointers, happy stories, sad stories . What to ask ? look for ?
pls let me know.
Thanks
Ava
Oxymoron.
And you want more??
I have only 1 thing to say to you. Don't do it! I have known several people who foolishly bought home warranties from various companies. Every single one of them felt totally ripped off when it came time to make a claim.
Take the money you'd pay for a warranty and put it in a bank account just for home repairs. You'll be a much happier homeowner in the end.
We bought a home warranty when we bought our current home, but we never had a claim, so I don't know whether the company was any good.
The warranty certainly cost less than a new refrigerator, washer or drier would have cost and less than the cost of a major roof repair, but none of those things happened and we didn't renew when the year was up.
Think of it the way you would an insurance policy: if you had a claim, it could save you a bundle; if you didn't have a claim, did you waste what you paid out in premiums?
Perce
On 09/07/05 03:31 pm snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com tossed the following ingredients into the ever-growing pot of cybersoup:
I have done work for those companies in the past but never will again. As a contractor, you must work dirt cheap and try to fix stuff that is junk. They will not pay for decent stuff, they wqant to buy the cheapest stuff possible. I have never seen anyone happy with one. Better to put your money in a Nigerian money scam.
Stretch
Opens a savings account just for the house. Put $500 or so a year into it and it will cover most anything the warranty company will cover. One big advantage is YOU get to pick the installer, the brand of replacement parts, etc. In 39 years of home ownership, I've never had an expense that a warranty would have been a good deal.
I can't add a thing to the good advice you list above.
In other words, they make good money on those things, YOUR money.
This is Turtle.
I would never give these Money Sharks a dime for every dime you give them is a lost dime. These House appliance insurance companys are after one thing and it is not to fix your equipment. i have did jobs for them in the past and everything that was used on the job was the cheapest material know to man. i did a job one time for AHS and there was a bad compressor , badly leaking condenser coil, and few small parts that was bad. It was $1,100.00 for just a repair and $1,170.00 for a new condenser unit. AHS agreed to just fix it and not pay the $70.00 more to replace a new unit. the customer elected to pay the difference of the $70.00 and I get paid up front $1,170.00 and changed out to a new unit. I did the job and was paid by the customer. About 6 month later i got a letter from a Attorney asking about the bill and the customer was sueing AHS for the money they did not pay that they agreed to pay. I have seen a lot of these money Grabbers with the jobs they do and i have rarely ever find a happy camper after they have to use the policy.
Start putting the premium amounts in the bank and you will probley be ahead in the long run.
TURTLE
I must agree having experience with a few of those companies, all came with the warranties when the houses were purchased. We had a bad toilet and the repair guy adjusted it but wouldn't fix it or replace any parts plus I had to pay a minimum service charge every time they came over. I finally replace the toilet myself at my own expense - that was many years ago and was the start of my DIY projects. The last house we purchased had a bad burner on a smooth cook top. You know those things are expensive to repair and most of the time you might as well replace it with a new one. The company that warranted the home said its too expensive to fix or replace but agree to replace it with a cheaper non smooth cook top. I got as much money out of them for a non smooth cook top and install it myself. Got some $$ back but not all of it. The home warranty is a good selling point if your property is on the market, otherwise its not worth it.
On Wed, 7 Sep 2005 20:58:21 -0500, "TURTLE" scribbled this interesting note:
That is not probability. It is a certainty. How much is a home appliance insurance policy per year? $400? I don't know. How often does a $400 appliance that would be covered by this kind of policy actually fail? Once every year? Not really. Once every two years? Nope. Let's see, a water heater will last a decade or more, a HVAC system at least that long or double in some cases. Your refrigerator? Another decade. Dishwasher? The same, or longer. Washer and dryer? Ten, fifteen, twenty years. Toilets? You can keep rebuilding them yourself for pennies per year-they are simple devices to maintain.
And that is the point with most of these appliances. They are simple to maintain, and if you don't know how or lack the equipment (as in the case of HVAC), would you rather have someone out who is working for an insurance company or would you rather have someone out who is working for you?
It never ceases to amaze me the amount of basic information most homeowners don't possess about how their homes are put together and how they actually work (and that includes the things in the home as well.) A water heater is simple to remove and replace. The hard part is just the labor in physically removing the old one from the closet and putting the new one in. Most HVAC problems can be avoided if people just keep the filters clean and keep the outside unit clean. A refrigerator is a simple piece of equipment which, if it acts up, is also easy to fix with some basic tools and information and a nearby parts house. If a dishwasher fails, just replace it-they aren't hard to take out or install. A washer or dryer is even easier, but let's say the motor fails on the electric dryer...replace it yourself! An $80 motor is far cheaper than a $400 dryer! And the list goes on and on.
It is the law of averages and the house always wins. That's why most gamblers go broke. In this case, the house is the home appliance insurance company and the homeowner is the gambler. In every case, over time, the insurance company will win. If the homeowner had just put the premium money in a savings account (or CD, or Index Fund, etc.) the homeowner would still have that money and some interest (or dividends) on top of it, and the ability to pay for these kinds of repairs without the need for a third party.
Don't buy an insurance policy on the appliances in your house. Unless you just enjoy watching your money fly out the window!
-- John Willis snipped-for-privacy@airmail.net (Remove the Primes before e-mailing me)
I'll blame the internet for this, although my opinion is based on a small sample of younger people I've interacted with. I'm 52, and when I bought my first home, any problems automatically led to a trip to the library. Sometimes, the librarian would comment that she'd gotten positive feedback on a certain repair book, so I didn't even need to go to the card catalog. (What the hell is a card catalog? :-) ) This led to many repair triumphs such as replacing the transmission in my washing machine, with a little over-the-phone help from G.E.
Now, it seems the first place people turn to is the web, and that's NOT always the best thing. You can visit these newsgroups and perhaps get some good advice, after you sift out the insults, childish unintelligible writing, grammar, and other chaff. Maybe, if you're lucky, you might find something via google, but more often than not, you won't find disassembly diagrams. You might find PDF files someone's posted, but they look as if they scanned the original diagrams using a toaster.
There's still a whole series of excellent brand-specific appliance repair books at my library. Rochester NY is not a major metropolis. I'm sure other decent library systems have these books. But, finding them might require picking up the phone and speaking to another human being. What a concept.
On Thu, 08 Sep 2005 13:38:27 GMT, "Doug Kanter" scribbled this interesting note:
I agree there is no replacement for good reference books. But when our refrigerator recently started acting up (only a very few years old) I wasn't about to call a repair service and pay most of the cost of a new unit to have this one repaired. I was able to find a good *.pdf file of the exploded diagram on the GE appliance web site and that was help enough to track down the problem. What was the issue? Bad seal on the thermostat (located on one of the refrigerant lines in the freezer compartment behind the cover in the rear of the freezer compartment) that allowed water to penetrate, which ruined it. Cost to replace? About $12.00. Of course it took a while to rule out the timer and the heating element, but in the end the problem was fixed, properly, and without having to pay $400.00 (or more) per year for the poor "service" provided by these kinds of insurance policies.
I did the exact same thing when, a few weeks later, I had an electric starter go out in a gas oven. I researched the problem, found the cause of the problem, got a new starter installed, and called it a job well done. All for the cost of a little time and just a few dollars (instead of hundreds of dollars per year.) And I educated myself a bit as well, which is a nice side effect of this whole process...
-- John Willis snipped-for-privacy@airmail.net (Remove the Primes before e-mailing me)
*Some* appliance stores can be helpful, too. There's an independently owned one near me, with a parts counter. The guy had enough experience to help me rule out one of 3 causes of a problem with my dishwasher, by first replacing the cheapest ($9.00) part, before guessing about the $150 part. He was right. I wrote his boss a letter. The only problem with the whole affair is that the place is 2 doors down from a music store which I'd never heard of. I was forced to spend $75.00 there on two sets of bass guitar strings. Even so, it was cheaper than having a repair company deal with the dishwasher.
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