The things I do buy extended warranties on are LCD TVs/monitors and my cars.

Buy extended warranties?

Only on new cars and, since I've only ever bought a few of those, only on the one or two that were breaking the piggy bank. I did just cover the cost on one repair which required the replacement of the passenger seat on my Toyota Sequoia van. $5,500 for one seat!! The warranty cost me $1,200, so I guess I am money ahead, but why a seat costs that kind of money (and why they had to replace the whole seat to fix a small noise in the seat motor) is beyond me.

But for electronics, never, ever. My dad would sometimes give me a nice electronic toy (camera etc) for a special occasion and he would buy the warranty. I never once used any of them. He wasted his money.

Also, I think warranties are like insurance: you should buy them to cover expenses that you couldn't easily cover yourself. So, my logic is that I can generally purchase a new camera if I have to, and I can certainly pay $200-500 to have it repaired without taking out a loan, but $5,000 for a car seat (or new transmission) could be a problem.

I recently bought an EX1 and purchased the extended warranty. After considerable effort I managed to buy Sony's own extended warrant6y that provides three full years instead of their lousy standard warranty that is the same as their warranty on a cheap raidio. The Sony extended warranty was around $150 which seemed like a relative bargain on a $7000 camera that has seen it's share of problems.

John

Sony charged/charges at flat repair of $625

I have a TRV900 and I could have sworn the Flat Fee was like @$350 for it and the VX2000/2100 & PD150/170.

I think $625 is starting to get in the expensive range for these cameras.

That $600.00 figure has been around for at least 4 or 5 years that I know of. ANY kind of repair is the flat rate. I know one guy who wanted cracked handle fixed - $625.00. Other have had complete overhaurs including comple drive mech and lenses, still for the same $625.

Lynn

From the perspective of some retailers, the extended warranty is a way of getting more money from the consumer. We as human beings suck at evaluating whether or not they are a good deal. To figure out if they're worth buying, we need to have an idea what the failure rate is and what is covered by the extended warranty (the warranty might not cover certain things; the issuer might also try to avoid paying for repair work). Of course these are key pieces of information that is rarely provided to the consumer. When it comes to extended warranties, the consumer is screwed most of the time.

It's also dishonest when employees are trained to push extended warranties, receive incentives for selling a high percentage of them, and get fired if they don't sell enough (e.g. Best Buy, Futureshop). I find it dishonest that these companies advertise that their employees don't receive commission. (I don't believe any Sony division makes such dubious claims.) I would like to see more transparency... but it isn't likely to happen.

That's my rant about extended warranties anyways...

$5,500 for one seat!!
Smells fishy to me. Your car probably has at least four seats... four seats * $5000 = $20,000. MSRP of a Toyota Sequoia is $34K (but the salesman will give you a "discount" and upsell you on all the extras so it's hard to figure out the actual price)... so that would mean half of the car's cost goes to the seats?

It seems to me that they're just overpricing the seat.

For this small prosumer cam, Sony charged/charges at flat repair of $625, + tax/S&H.

That's cheap for you guys. In Denmark I had my PD170 serviced last year because of the automatic NR giving noise, and that would have cost me $1,600. Now I 'only' wanted a cleanup because I can live with the NR not being on, and that cost me $400,- I think that is a high price, and I told Siony too when they called me on a survey a few weeks later.

/Ulf

On the other hand...

My 8 month old Samsung 46" HDTV (lnt 4661f) started to show 2 small vertical stripes that grew longer each time I turned on the set till I ended up with two stripes the height of the screen with a big 1" square blob at the top. Ugly...!

Called Samsung, and shock and awe a human answered!
No challenging questions beyond model and serial # and I was given a transaction # and told I would be contacted by a local repairman. Sure enough I got a call and once the whole front panel arrived (about a week) I got a call, they came and disassembled the whole tv right on the living room floor and replaced the whole front panel. Took about an hour using a cordless screwdriver as the only tool. Works great, looks great, no cost whatsoever. I'm very happy with the unquestioned service and I had no extended warrantee.

However, the tech guy told me once the warrantee period is over (13months from date of purchase) I might just as well throw out the tv as it would be too expensive to repair....

You win some and you lose some.....

Eileen

When I used to work for Apple back in the '80's we pushed extended warranties hard because they were cash cows. Apple's cost for a $200 fee was about $20, based on actual repair rates and parts and labor costs.

As a result, I never get extended warranties, but for some people it still makes sense. My father, for example, is 90 years old and insisted on an extended warranty on his car a few years back. He simply didn't want to have to think about repair costs, and was happier dealing with an up-front cost. In a very real sense, paying an insurance premium is pretty much the same thing--you trade a known loss for the possibility of a loss over a given period.

As for good deals, a few months back my young daughter wiped out a new tire by striking the concrete curb during a moment's inattention while driving 25mph. The wheel pinched the tire against the curb, rupturing the sidewall spectacularly. Back at Costco, the source of the original tire(s), my total replacement / remounting cost was $14, even though I mentioned the damage was entirely my daughter's fault.

I have an original Powerbook G4 laptop sitting in a case unused because it doesn't work. After about a year and a half of light use, I tried to turn it on and it no longer worked. It turns out it needs a new system board and the cost for that is over $800. That is about three times what that laptop is going for last time I checked on ebay.

On top of that, when I first got it, it had a really bright pixel right where the video window normally opens up. I complained about it to Apple, but was told that it was "within spec" and they acted like I was way out of bounds to even complain about it. Whatever, it looked like crap.

In that case I should have gotten an extended warranty, but only because of how much Apple artificially inflates their parts prices.

"My father, for example, is 90 years old and insisted on an extended warranty on his car a few years back. He simply didn't want to have to think about repair costs, and was happier dealing with an up-front cost. In a very real sense, paying an insurance premium is pretty much the same thing--you trade a known loss for the possibility of a loss over a given period."

His motivation is perfectly understandable. It is one of the reasons that the warranty business can successfully market vehicle warranties with bloated price tags. It becomes worse when the warranty has been paid, but the needed repairs aren't covered under the policy.

Credit Unions will often have extended vehicle warranties that don't line the car salesman's commission checks.