Home warranties

[frugal-one]

Decided to ask for a home warranty with our home purchase. Not sure how much good they are but thought it couldn't hurt. Seller is paying for it. Anyone have any experience with these?

[Teacher Terry]

I have always purchased one if any appliances, furnace, etc were old and they always paid if something broke. They would fix if possible and if not replace.

[jp1]

Our realtor bought ours. It paid for a new garage door opening machine because one of the door springs broke but current code requires that the machine be upgraded to one with a battery backup. (A result of the 2017 tubbs fire where an elderly woman died in her garage because the power was out so she couldn’t open the door).

[frugal-one]

Does the warranty cover only one incident? Probably depends on the policy?

[Tybee]

Our realtor bought one on a house twenty years ago, and we got a new dishwasher out of it.

[jp1]

Does the warranty cover only one incident? Probably depends on the policy?

Ours would have covered anything that happened during the policy period (one year). The garage door was the only thing that happened. It would be pretty tough to craft policy wording that ended the policy once one claim was paid so I assume most cover however many things for the duration of the policy period. The one thing I’ve heard from multiple sources is that the policies WON’T pay to replace stuff unless code requires they do that. So, if our 43 year old furnace had died that first winter they would have paid to fix it but not paid anything if we made the logical decision to just replace it if it had broken down.

[Teacher Terry]

Every time we got a home warranty we were lucky that an appliance died and couldn’t be repaired so we always got a new one out of the deal. It happened three times.