My question is about the home warranty policy for my home, house was built in 1980.What are things we should look for when deciding on a warranty policy?
Should I look for a company that covers pre-existing conditions? Do you recommend a certain warranty company?
Eric
Tom’s Answer:
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Tom: I don’t recommend any of them. I’m not one to ever encourage people to buy them. Some people buy extended warranty, some don’t. I know you like extended warranties on all your electronics. We’ve talked about that before.
Charlie: On my portable electronics.
Tom: There you go.
Charlie: Like my iPad, my iPhone and stuff like that. The computers in the office—not so much because…
Tom: But you get them for your cars, you get them for all kinds of stuff, so in most cases, I will tell you this with the home, for most people it’s not worth the money. You need to just maintain your home with your money and you’ll come out ahead in the long run if your home is a decent house.
Charlie: It’s especially true of the ones you buy when you buy a house too, those ones in particular.
Tom: That’s more of a sales tool for realtors to make the buyer feel comfortable and I know you are selling your house and you might want to offer a really big one.
Charlie: From your lips to God’s ears, but yeah.
Tom: But it is an incentive for people to buy, and they feel comfortable even though it doesn’t do a lot of good for them.
Charlie: Sure. That’s exactly right and we got one on the house that we bought and first time we called.
Tom: What happened?
Charlie: What do you think?
Tom: Look at the face. Now we need TV here.
Charlie: This is why we didn’t have the video on. What do you think happened? You know, they send out this galoot to come look at the plumbing problem and I wanted to call TDT, I wanted to call Abacus. No we had to go with the schmuck they wanted to send out.
Tom: You have to go with their people.
Charlie: They send this guy out. He cuts all these holes in the ceiling and never fixes the leak.
Tom: Really?
Charlie: Yeah. Meanwhile I am having one of our guys come and fix it.
Tom: So you had to pay anyway?
Charlie: And we had to pay him anyway. It’s like you get what you pay for and my advice on anybody on these home warranties if I may offer as having [inaudible].
Tom: Please do. Actually you’d be the kind of person that’s not skilled that might think to have them but when you have them you find out it wasn’t worth it.
Charlie: Our first house, the one we had back on [inaudible] way back when?
Tom: Yes.
Charlie: The air conditioner was so old that the warranty company wouldn’t let them replace it but would pay for them to make parts for it. So that’s Eric where you are going with these warranty guys.
Tom: Went back to that bureaucracy stuff, you know?
Charlie: It’s a bad program.
Tom: Too many generals, not enough soldiers.
Charlie: That’s right. And not enough, you know, testicular fortitude if you know what I mean.