My IL love theirs. They pay $65 if somebody comes out to fi something. They ended up upgrading it to cover the expenses of bringing something up to code (required in their city). They are very poor money managers so it is easy for them to pay the monthly premium and come up with $65 than it is to cover a repair.

Personally, I think it is a better use of my money to put money into savings and cover things as they come up, pick my own repair men and monitor things myself. I think it just depends on your personal money style. Good luck with the closing.

Well, this is $500 up front, one time fee for 1 year. On a 100 year old house, the chances of using it at least once are decent I would think.

The one I'm looking at is through AB May, HomeWarranty Plus

How much time do you have?

The HW that my friend has came to "repair" their fridge 8 times in 2 months. Everytime, they were not on time (always late). She got really annoyed with always waiting for them. And, rather than replacing the fridge, they insisted they could repair it.

(I think after the 8th time, they may have finally decided to replace it).

But, seriously, do you have the time to wait forever and a day for a late repairman; perhaps multiple times for one issue?

My daughter, son and I all have home warranties with AHS for quite a few years. We have all been very pleased with them. My daughter had one of those LG french door fridges which caught on fire. They replaced that one, and then replaced the one which replaced it, because at 3 years old, LG was unable to supply repair parts.

I have been personally very pleased with the repair people who have been sent. We are even able to specify which repair company we want as long as they are contracted vendors with AHS.

Waiting for repairmen is a non-issue. The contracted vendors have all been very reliable. We've had repair people for our heating/ air conditioning, fridge, microwave, dishwasher, range, disposer and probably other things I've forgotten about.

Most years we get our full value out of our warrantee. The service charge just increased to $100/visit, but that still doesn't begin to cover what would be the cost of most repairs.

Helene

I've had one on other homes I've purchased, but I always negotiated with the seller to pay for it. And I've definitely received value from them.

They are service contracts, not warranties.

Generally the longer the company can drag things out the better for them.

This post was edited by brickeyee on Tue, Mar 12, 13 at 11:51

We also had one on our 95-year-old home ("gift" from our realtor) and did use it for a $1K repair in the first year. We didn't renew it and I don't think would have used it in the five years since, but for $500 I might do it again for the first year in a new house where you don't know as much as you might like to about its history.

One caveat is that you must use their contractors, which was a PITA for us as they didn't have anyone in our city--all out in the suburbs. So that took some time, as someone noted. If you do get one, make sure it itemizes all of your appliances to be sure they're covered, and read the fine print for exclusions (there are many). Congrats on the new house!

We included a service contract when we sold our last house. The buyers have used it several times and have told us how happy they were to have it. The cost was less than $500 and I know they have received many times the benefit as it covered the pool equipment which ended up with some issues after a few months.