Your home is your castle. If you’re like most homeowners, you take pride in keeping your place a certain way.
But owning a home is expensive — and it’s not just the mortgage payments, taxes, and insurance that can put a strain on your wallet. You also need to cover maintenance and repairs — and you never know when something might break down around the house. Major appliance and home systems repairs and replacements can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars — enough to clean out your savings and put you into debt.
Don’t let the thought of expensive home repairs keep you up at night. A home warranty can protect your budget, make it easier to arrange repairs, and let you make service requests at any time of the day or night.
Table of Contents
Protect Your Budget from Unexpected Expenses
Budget protection is one of the biggest benefits of a home warranty for most homeowners. Home warranty prices average about $300 to $500 a year for a simple plan, which will usually cover the most common major home appliances, like the refrigerator, range, dishwasher, built-in microwave, and garbage disposal, as well as home systems like electrical, HVAC, and some plumbing repairs. Some home warranties will cover roof repairs as well. You can also buy add-on coverage for pools and spas, septic tanks, guest houses, and even home electronics.
Unlike homeowners insurance, which protects the structure and contents of your home against catastrophic damage, a home warranty is a service contract that covers normal-wear-and-tear breakdowns of appliances and home systems that were in good working order when you bought the home, but have since failed. You might never use your homeowners insurance, or you might only use it once or twice in all the decades you live in your home — storms, fires, and other causes of catastrophic damage don’t befall most homeowners that often. But you’ll probably use your home warranty at least once a year, if not more often, to line up service and defray the cost of repairing or replacing covered home systems and appliances.
Most home warranty plans offer a specified amount of coverage for repair and replacement of covered home appliances and systems — after you pay a trade service call fee (usually around $75, though this varies), the rest of the cost of your repair or replacement will be covered up to your plan limits. While some of the most expensive home repairs and replacements might not be fully covered — for example, the cost of an HVAC replacement may easily exceed your plan’s coverage limits — a home warranty can still save you thousands when it comes to the cost of home repairs.
A home warranty can save you money, but that’s not the only way it protects your budget. Because your monthly home warranty costs are predictable, buying one can take the uncertainty out of funding home repairs. There’s no longer any guesswork when you have a home warranty — you’ll know what to expect in terms of home maintenance and repair costs, whether it’s paying your monthly plan costs or covering your trade service call fee.
Take the Stress Out of Finding a Repair Technician
As if coming up with the money to fund a repair last-minute isn’t stressful enough, it can often be difficult just to find and schedule repairs. The best technicians are kept pretty busy, and many homeowners struggle to get even a call back about their issue. When you have a home warranty, you make your service request directly to the home warranty company, and they’ll send out someone local with whom they have a pre-existing relationship. You’ll still get to support a local business, but you won’t have to run yourself ragged finding someone — and since most home warranty companies carefully background-check the contractors they work with, you’ll know it’s someone you can trust.
Get Help Around the Clock
When your pipes burst at 2:00 a.m. or your furnace breaks on Christmas Eve, you don’t want to wait to request service. Most home warranty companies offer 24/7 assistance over the phone and online, so you can request service any time of the day or night, and get the ball rolling on your repair right away.
Keeping your home in good shape is a lot of work, but a home warranty can help. You’ll be able to save tons on appliance and home systems repairs, so you’ll have more money for home improvements, landscaping, and other fun stuff. Plus, it takes the stress out of lining up repairs. Try one — soon, you won’t know how you ever managed to live without it.
