Two-year-old handset, I could replace it secondhand for about €300. The carrier plan is €9 a month plus a €70 excess per claim, covering accidental damage and theft with a police report. That's €108 a year before I've claimed anything at all. I have cracked exactly one screen in eleven years of owning phones. Talk me out of cancelling, or tell me I'm right.
The exception that flips it: if losing the phone for a week costs you income, you're insuring downtime rather than hardware. My partner is a courier and a dead phone is a dead day's earnings — for her the cover is about how fast a replacement arrives, so the clause she actually reads is the turnaround commitment, not the sum insured.
This is the right lens for almost all gadget cover. Read the service level, not the payout.
Check what you already hold before you decide either way. Some home contents policies cover personal items away from the home, some packaged bank accounts include gadget cover, and some card purchases carry damage cover for a limited window after buying. I was double-insured for two years and never noticed until I read both documents in the same week.
Digging out the contents policy tonight. That genuinely had not occurred to me.
Claimed once. It took eleven days, they sent a refurbished handset of the same model, and my premium went up at renewal. It worked. I still cancelled afterwards, because the process was more annoying than saving up would have been, and I'd rather be annoyed at myself than at a call centre.
Theft is the part people underweight. A cracked screen you can budget for; a phone taken on a night out is a bad week and a €900 problem if you're on a current handset. On a two-year-old phone worth €300, though, I agree with everyone else here.
Insure the things you cannot afford to replace. You can afford to replace this one.
@emergency_fund_ed · 8h ago · 2 replies
You've already done the maths and you want permission. €108 a year plus €70 to claim, against a €300 replacement, means you need something like a claim every two and a half years just to break even — and that's before the fact that a claim often gets you a refurbished unit rather than a new one. One cracked screen in eleven years is your answer. Put the €9 somewhere you can't spend it.
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@annualfee_amy · 8h ago
Three years of that and the jar has bought the phone outright. That's the framing I keep circling back to.
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