Think Twice Before You Buy That Extended Warranty

iStock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — What if you paid hundreds of dollars to buy an extended warranty on your kitchen appliances only to find out a critical piece wasn’t covered? That’s exactly what the Hoftiezer family said happened to them.

With their appliances a few years old, David Hoftiezer of Medford, N.J., found Stanley Warranty and said he thought he was getting the same kind of protection his original warranties had given him.

Hoftiezer said he paid $1,000 for a warranty for all of his kitchen appliances. Then he started having some “issues,” he said.

First, the refrigerator’s ice maker broke.

“Weeks go by and the warranty company finally said to me, ‘The reason we followed up service is because your ice maker is not covered,'” he said.

Unfortunately, though the warranty specified that the refrigerator and freezer were covered, the contract said, about six pages in, that “ice maker controls” were not covered.

Hoftiezer told ABC News he wished he would have read that.

“I’m not going to say I don’t take some responsibility,” Hoftiezer said. “But when they sell you the product, they ask you what would you like to cover and you say, ‘I would like to cover my refrigerator.’ They don’t say, ‘If your ice maker breaks, that isn’t covered.'”

Stanley Mankovsky, the CEO of Stanley Safe Club and Stanley Warranty, said the ice maker was excluded from Hoftiezer’s policy because “it’s a high volume item that gets broken by people abusing it.”

“If people want the ice maker covered, we have separate coverage for that in addition to the refrigerator,” Mankovsky said.

“The reason you buy an insurance policy is to make sure that when something does happen, you are covered,” he said. “The key is to read [and] make sure you go through every line.”

Mankovsky also added that since Hoftiezer had bought his warranty, the language had been revised and improved so that it was easier for consumers to understand.

Anthony Giorgianni, a finance editor at Consumer Reports, said readers should think twice before buying an extended warranty.

“Not saying they will never work out but on a whole, you’re much better taking the money that you would put into a service contract [and] put it in the bank,” he said.

Some items that might that might be worth getting an extended warranty for, Giorgianni said, are electronics that children usually use and are more likely to be dropped or damaged. He still encourages consumers to read the fine print on those agreements, too.

Giorgianni’s other tips are to call the original manufacturer if something breaks– because sometimes the companies will want to keep the customer happy — and to check with your credit card company, which will sometimes offer extended warranties.

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