One of the options that you’re going to have when you’re shopping for cell phones is the option to purchase insurance. Insurance for your cell phones will protect you in the event that your phone is damaged or lost. Whether or not this is something you want to invest in depends on a number of factors, each of which you need to carefully consider.
Here are the things you need to think about when deciding whether or not you want to buy insurance for your cell phones:
- How likely are you to lose or damage your phone? Statistically speaking, about one in three customers will lose their cell phones or damage it within the first year of owning it. This adds up to more than 60 million cell phones each year in the United States that are damaged or lost. You need to think about your history with cell phones, and decide how many near-misses you’ve had (or times that you’ve damaged or lost your phone) in order to decide whether or not to purchase the peace of mind that insurance brings.
- How much did your phone cost? You need to also take into account the amount you paid for your phone. Now, it’s easy to look at the actual amount of cash that you laid out for your phone, but that’s not the important number here. What you need to look at is the retail cost. The fact of the matter is that most of the cell phone carriers offer you a significant discount on your cell phone equipment by signing a contract. The cost of your phone is likely as much as $200 more than what you actually paid. If your phone is lost or damaged during your contract, you’d have to pay the full retail price to replace it.
- Do you have a backup? Many families choose to opt out of cell phone insurance based on the fact that they have multiple lines. What they do is to stagger out their contracts so that, at any given time, they have a line or two that is up for renewal. If one of the phones they’re using is lost or stolen during that time, they will simply renew one of their lines, get a new phone, and rotate the numbers between phones if they need to.
As is the case with any other kind of insurance, you need to decide whether the risk that you’ll have to pay to replace your lost or damaged phone is worth what it would cost to insure it.
