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Originally Posted by Quicksilver
Your anology while understood has a lot of holes in it. Only a fool would not have health, homeowners insurance, life insurance, automobile insurance. It aint about peace of mind it's about good judgement and common sense. So getting an extended warranty in no way correlates with buying insurance. If you think so try dying, getting into an auto accident, or getting open heart surgery and see where your extended warranty gets you.
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When you buy insurance, or buy an extended warranty, you are basically making a "bet" with the insurance company. If the cost of the insurance or warranty is X dollars, then you are betting that you will end up claiming more than X dollars worth of benefits, while the insurance company is betting that your total claims will be less than X dollars over the life of the policy or warranty. But unless the insurance company is dumb or poorly run, they will win these bets more times than not, thus making a profit - their end goal and the reason why they are in business.
The general rule is that you should only insure what you absolutely cannot afford to lose (as in your examples of life insurance, health insurance, homeowners insurance, etc). Insuring a laptop computer that costs $1000 is not a sound financial move unless you absolutely could not afford to pay to get it fixed if it was broken, because the odds say that the cost of the extended warranty will be more than whatever repair costs you will have. Most people who buy the warranty (or any kind of insurance) will pay more to the insurance company than they receive back in claims, and of course the total money paid for all claims will be less than the total money paid to the insurance company for these extended warranties.
Now if you are someone who tends to be very abusive to your laptop, and thus you expect to have more problems than the average customer, then maybe the warranty will be a good idea for you. But if you are an average user, I would say it is not a sound investment.