I know that purchasing extended warranties isn't recommended. That said, many products come with warranties, and while it can be a pain to keep track of them and even to take advantage of them I wanted to share 2 recent wins.
- We have a pair of Nikon Monarch M5 binoculars purchased in 2023 from REI for about $250. I dropped them at some point and while they didn't immediately break, over time the eye piece stopped working. We recently submitted through the Nikon warranty portal for repair and mentioned the drop/break and it's been longer than 2 years (included standard warranty which is all we had) and still we were able to get the repair done at no charge! We had them back in less than 3 weeks from shipping them out.
- Our Vitamix blender bought in 2019 on Amazon for $280 comes with a 7 year warranty and recently it broke (the blade mechanism and blade turner piece in the base)…so we called Vitamix customer service and got a prepaid shipping label sent, mailed it off, and had it back in about two weeks fully repaired (no cost!).
So TL;DR keep your proofs of purchases for items / register them (we had registered the vitamix with an old email we no longer had access to, but not the binos) and check warranties if/when things break just in case! We are going to start writing the date of purchase + warranty timeframe on boxes for items that we keep in our attic so we can more easily check versus trying to find the date of purchase for things that have long warranties. A spreadsheet would probably be even easier / take up less space.
