We are considering to purchase 52 years old house renovated 9 years ago.
Is Home warranty a product any of you have an experience with?
The general home warranties are pretty worthless IMO. Instead, I'd suggest looking into American Modern or other well rated home insurance company that offers Mechanical Breakdown coverage. Granted I'm not sure what you're looking to insure - talk with an agent to get the best info - I'm not aware of a "home warranty" covering the house exactly - just appliances and things like well pumps etc. But as
@RX8 said, they will only replace with the absolute lowest end "range" or "washing machine" or whatever.
OTOH, I have nothing bad to say about the mechanical breakdown coverage. The one I have has a ~$50 a year premium and a $500 deductible, so if you've mostly got those $299 specials in appliances and the like it won't help you. If however you tend to have stuff that's more expensive, it's been kinda a godsend for us. We are "water cursed" and anything that touches water will die, or be messed up somehow. I've had them cover many things for us, and they always let us choose the replacement. Once approved, they take the quote we provide, subtract $500 and send us a check for the difference. We do have to get a tech to investigate and indicate if it's repairable or not. So far, the techs always say it's not reasonable to try and repair - usually they don't seem to like to do repairs that would cost more than the $500 deductible. At least where we live in NY. Once the tech writes up that it's not reparable, we send it all in and usually we get a check (or now direct deposit) in ~ 3 weeks. We first used them when our pressure tank was buried and kept getting popped by rocks. But the place didn't have space inside for a pressure tank unless we replaced the hot water heater with a instant propane hot water heater and a special constant pressure system. We did end up paying 2 deductibles in that case as we were replacing 2 systems, but they paid the other amount (I think it was like $8000 or so). They have over the years covered our portable generator we use as back-up power for the house when it suddenly died after 2.5 years, they covered our dishwasher when it sprung a leak, a fridge that died, and more.
I find the biggest PITA is finding a qualified repair person to attest that the appliance or whatever must be replaced.
What they don't cover is maintenance - I think some of the "home warranties" will sort of cover that, but for the difference between $70 a month and $40 a year in premiums, I can usually pay a few hundred for the maintenance on stuff anyway.
