EXTENDED WARRANTIES

     The likelihood of repairs increases as machines get older.   This universal truth is the reason behind extended warranties.  A car is just a machine and it will need repairs even if you buy a brand new one.

Should I buy an Extended Warranty?

     Whether or not to purchase a warranty is a very hard question to answer with a simple "yes" or "no".  In a perfect world, we would all have the discipline to save money from each check for "rainy days" .  Sadly most of us DO NOT.  Some of you are in the process of rebuilding credit and do not have a handy dandy credit card to fall back on.  A warranty may be right for you.  The cost of repairing a car can be EXPENSIVE.  Even what seems to be a minor repair can set you back major money.  

MINOR repairs?

     I grew up working on my own cars.  I do not claim to be a mechanic but in the past I could handle most minor repairs myself.  Today cars are much more complex.  Computers and sensors are all over the place and it looks like there is 100's of miles of wires.  I will use a radiator as my example.  On my older cars replacing the radiator cost under a $100 and would take me at most 2 hours,  My sister had a similar problem on her Kia.  You might think it would be cheap to fix a radiator on a Kia, you would be wrong.  Her radiator had a leak and in turn this caused several other components to fail costing well over $400.  An employee of my sister also had a radiator problem on her Mazda.  At last report she had spent over $800 and still going.  Getting cars repaired can be as expensive as going to a doctor.  

We will cover more about warranties in part II