I track pretty much every expense, use ynab, popgot, check my credit score monthly, all that stuff, but somehow I never thought to shop around for my car warranty when I bought my used car last year.
The dealership offered me their extended warranty for $5,200, I negotiated down to $4,800 and felt pretty good about myself and thought I got myself a deal, but fast forward to last week, my coworker mentioned he bought his warranty online for way less and I was like wait what, you can do that? So I spent an hour comparing prices on different sites, and found even better coverage than what I had for literally $3,700 on chaiz with NAAC as the administrator, same deductible, better coverage limits actually.
I'm still in my 30 day cancellation window so I cancelled the dealer one and bought online instead, getting $1,100 back and man that's like almost a full month of groceries for my family, just gone because I didn't think to look elsewhere.
If you're buying a used car, seriously compare warranty prices online before saying yes to whatever the dealer offers, the markup is insane and I had no idea. it's like everything else now, you wouldn't book a flight without comparing prices right? same thing here.
car warranty comparison showed me that I overpaid but I saved hundreds switching online
byu/Ron_Swanson_1990 inFrugal
Posted by Ron_Swanson_1990
7 Comments
this is solid advice, dealers make so much money on financing and warranties, but good catch on the cancellation window
Wait, you can cancel dealer warranties? I didn’t know that, I’m gonna check my paperwork now
I always shop around for everything except somehow I never thought about this for car stuff, definitely doing this when I buy my next car
dealerships bank on people not knowing they can get this stuff cheaper elsewhere, it’s like their entire profit model at this point
So do you purchase the warranty outright or can you roll it into financing if you’re using that? I know the ideal is to pay cash for the car and warranty but that’s not always feasible.
I had no idea about this – thank you so much for the heads up! So glad you ended up with a better deal!
I don’t buy warranty’s on anything. They are generally hard to use and a pure waste of money