[Christien]

Each time we've renewed our mortgage, we've got a free year of coverage (2 different companies). The first time, we'd done the mortgage through my SIL. Our furnace was being flaky and I happened to mention it to her in passing. She mentioned the coverage thing, and sure enough we had about a month of coverage left. $50 and we were back in business - took the guy 2 or 3 hours to fix it. A few years later, same thing, but this time the blower isn't working. We had about 10 days of coverage left. (mortgage renewal is beginning of March, so both of these occurrences were in February when it was a million below zero out). A team of 2 guys spent 2 days working on our furnace, and by the time they'd finished, they'd replaced the entire guts of the furnace - the only thing original was the chassis and burners. He said we should get another 15 years out of it.

So these programs do have their upside! Of course, we didn't renew after that - the furnace was the only thing covered that I was concerned about going. We need a new a/c compressor, but we'll just pay out of pocket.