Make Good Use of Warranties. You can save a lot of money by claiming warranties!

Product warranties are pretty common place these days. Usually products will have a warranty of a year or more that guarantees they will be good throughout that time. If it breaks or does not meet expectations, you can usually make a claim and get reimbursed or get a replacement item.

While warranties are common, it seems many people do not claim them even in situations where they could. This could be because they forget the product is covered under warranty so they just buy a new item. Or they may want to claim a warranty but they do not have the paperwork needed to do it. Or they are just lazy and don't want to do the work it takes to make the claim.

For most warranty claims, you usually have to have your original receipt that shows when and where you purchased the item. This is why it is important to save paperwork and receipts especially for larger purchases. The receipts often have the warranty details, but sometimes you may have to look them up on a company website to see how to make a claim.

It can take some work if you do decide to make a claim. You might have to fill out a form or mail something in. Despite the work involved, it is usually worth it if it means being able to save money either by getting a free replacement or by getting a discount on an identical item.

I have a couple examples recently where I was able to claim warranties and save quite a bit of money:

Years ago my car was hit by another car so I had taken it into a collision repair shop to have the body work fixed and painted. Then recently I noticed that the paint was starting to peel off. Just for the heck of it I looked up the receipt and saw it had a warranty that covered the paint for as long as you own the vehicle. So I made a few calls to the collision center and brought my car in to get checked out.

They looked it over and agreed to cover it under the warranty so I ended up getting my car repainted for free! This normally would cost a lot of money. I was able to claim this warranty because I saved the paperwork and followed through on the steps to make the claim.

Another car related warranty that I recently dealt with was for my tires. I purchased a set that had a tread wear warranty of 50,000 miles. Well after about 20,000 miles a couple of the tires were worn down to the bottom. I looked up the details of the warranty and saw that they should be eligible since they were rotated as recommended and I had the paperwork. So I was able to get a big discount on replacement tires based on the mileage that had yet to be fulfilled.

In situations like these, you could imagine that many people don't even think about the possibility of a warranty and they end up just paying full price to have a service done or have a product replaced when in many cases the warranty would cover it.

Next time you have a product that breaks or does not last very long, make sure to see if it is still under warranty and make sure to save your receipts so you can make those claims!