Car Insurance - Black box has broken and insurance company wants me to pay?
Unless it is in the contract that you must replace it then this should be replaced by your insurance. They sent you a box that was defective, consumer grade electronics are designed for at least 85 deg C (185F) and unless they can prove your car was hotter than that they sent you a defective unit.  That being said, I do not think it would be worth suing them for that low amount, I would suggest you get a new insurance company. The current company clearly values your business less than 185 pounds(?) and this issue will happen multiple times since the company has no incentive to buy better products if customers keep footing the bill. "First read the fine print. If you have to pay it, pay it and switch company. If you don't have to pay it and there is no proof that you abused the component beyond normal usage, you don't have to sue them, just return the invoice with legal (not so layman) text like ""I hereby reject paying invoice number xxxx dated xxx because the black box was used under normal conditions and it stopped working"". In this case you wait for them and answer every other letter with the same text until the decide to either sue you, or drop the whole thing. If you choose this path, remember to save all invoice, copies of your rejections, all written/email/phone calls, picutres of the broken item, serial nubmers, contract etc. If they sue you and they loose (can't prove the item was destroied by you), they have to pay you up to one hour of legal advice cost and drop the invoice, if you loose, you do the same (100 pounds) plus the invoice amount according to Swedish law, don't know about your country. Before you follow any advice here, consult your local consumer protection agency, they usually comes up with smart options, they know a bad company with history and give you the right advice."
"Here's what you do without, on the negative side, just for balance: A bill: When I last had comprehensive insurance, it cost something like 3-4% of the value of the car per annum.  (Obviously ymmv enormously but I think that's somewhere near the middle of the range and I'm not especially risky.)  So, compared to the total depreciation and running costs of the car, it's actually fairly substantial.  Over the say 10 years I might keep that car, it adds up to a fair slice of what it will take to buy a replacement. Financial crisis costs: I don't know about you, but my insurance went up something like 30% in recent years, despite the value-insured and the risk going down, said by the insurer to be due to market turmoil.  So, at least hundreds of dollars is just kind of frictional loss, and I'd rather not pay it. Wrangling with the insurer: if you have insurance and a loss, you have to persuade them to pay out, perhaps document the original conditions or the fault, perhaps argue about whether their payment is fair.  I've done this for small (non-automotive) claims, and it added up to more hassle than the incident itself.  Obviously all insurers will claim they're friendly to deal with but until you actually have a big claim you never know. Moral hazard: I know I'm solely responsible for not having my car crashed or stolen.  Somehow that just feels better. Free riders: I've seen people ""fudge"" their insurance claims so that things that shouldn't have been covered were claimed to be.  You might have too.  Buy insurance and you're paying for them. Choice: Insurers are typically going to make the decision for you about whether a claim is repairable or not, and in my experience are reluctant or refuse to just give you the cash amount of the claim. (See also, moral hazard.)  Do it yourself and you can choose whether to live with it, make a smaller or larger repair, or replace the whole vehicle with a second hand one or a brand new one, or indeed perhaps do without a vehicle. A distraction: Hopefully by the time you've been working for a while, a vehicle is not a really large fraction of your net worth.  If you lose 10% of your net worth it's not really nice but - well, you could easily have lost that off the value of your house or your retirement portfolio in recent years.  What you actually need to insure is genuinely serious risks that would seriously change your life if they were lost, such as your ability to work.  For about the same cost as insuring a $x car, you can insure against $x income every year for the rest of your life, and I think it's far more important. If I have a write-off accident but walk away I'll be perfectly happy. And, obviously, liability insurance is important, because being hit for $millions of liabilities could also have a serious impact.   Coverage for mechanical failures: If your 8yo car needs a new transmission, insurance isn't going to help, yet it may cost more than the typical minor collision.  Save the money yourself and you can manage those costs out of the same bucket. Flexibility: If you save up to replace your car, but some other crisis occurs, you can choose to put the money towards that.  If you have car insurance but you have a family medical thing it's no help. I think the bottom line is: insure against costs you couldn't cope with by yourself.  There are people who need a car but can just barely afford it, but if you're fortunate enough not to be in that case you don't really need comprehensive insurance." "A Credit Default Swap (CDS) is a contract between two parties. A useful analogy is insurance (but by no means exact).  I pay a quarterly premium in order to insure myself against another event.  In this case, it might be that I own some IBM Bonds.  I am happy to own those bonds, and like the ""coupon"" that they pay me.  But I am a little worried about IBM going bankrupt.  So I can find someone willing to sell me a CDS.  So long as I keep up my ""premium"" payments, if IBM goes into default on their bonds, I get a payout. This analogy does break down at a couple of levels.  Firstly there is no requirement that I have to own the IBM bond in the first place.  I can in effect then ""take a view"" on IBM going into default by purchasing a CDS without owning the underlying asset. Also in the real insurance world, there are various capital requirements that the companies have to adhere to, while CDS market, being essentially unregulated has none. So to summarize, and while The Pedia has a pretty good article, they are good both to hedge your bet (i.e. protect your actual owned asset) or as a speculative tool to take a ""view"" on the likelihood of a company to go bankrupt." "In general, if you can afford to replace something, you are able to ""self-insure"".  You really want to understand a little of the statistics before you can make a generic call, but my rule of thumb is that insurance via ""extended warranty"" is rarely a good deal.  Here is a simple expected value math formula you can apply (when the > is true, then you should buy it): replacement cost x likelihood of using warranty % > cost of insurance You can then back-compute, what is the likelihood that I'd need to lose this item to break even?  Given your numbers: $2000 x Y > $350 or Y > (350/2000) or Y > 17.5% So if you think there is a 17.5% or greater chance that you'll need to have you system replaced (i.e. not just a simple fix) AND (as Scott pointed out) you'll be able to actually use the replacement warranty then the applecare is a good purchase.  Note, this only applies to items you can replace out-of-pocket without significant burden, because if you didn't have the $10k to replace your car, it wouldn't matter if the insurance wasn't such a good deal (especially if you need the car to get to work, etc.) So the obvious question is: ""Why would a for-profit company ever offer insurance on something they are statistically likely to lose money on?""  The obvious answer is ""they wouldn't,"" but that doesn't mean you should never buy this type of insurance, because you may have statistically significant circumstances. For instance, I purchased a $40 remote helicopter as a gift for my children.  I also paid the $5 for a ""no questions asked"" warranty on it because, knowing my kids, I knew there was a nearly 100% chance they would break it at least once.  In this case, this warranty was well worth the $5, because they did break it!  Presumably they make money on these warranties because most of the purchasers of the plan are more attentive (or too lazy to make the claim) than in this case. Edit note: I incorporated Scott's comment about likelihood of being able to utilize the warranty into a combined ""likelihood of using warranty"" term.  This term could be broken up into likelihood of needing replacement x likelihood of actually getting company to replace it I didn't do this above because it makes it a little harder to understand, and may not be a major factor in all cases, but you can definitely add it after the fact (i.e. if there's only a 90% chance Applecare will pay out at all, then divide the 17.5% by 0.9 to get 19.4% likelihood of needing the replacement for it to be cost effective). More complete formulas can be derived also (including terms for full replacement costs vs repair costs and including terms for ""deductible"" type costs or shipping), but I'm trying to keep things relatively simple for those who aren't statistics nerds like I am." Insurance is a funny product.  As you said, it is a little like gambling.  When I buy term life insurance, I'm essentially betting that I'm going to die within the next 20 years, and the insurance company is betting that I'm not.  I'm hoping to lose that bet! Besides all of the reasons that other answers mentioned, I think part of the reason is psychological.  As in my example, I'm setting up a kind of a win-win situation for myself here.  Let's go with car insurance, a less-morbid example than my first example.  If I don't get into a car accident, great!  If I do get into a car accident, then the traumatic event is at least offset by the fact that the financial impact to me is minimal.  Win-win. The bank doesn't have to do anything. It is your responsibility to provide the proof of insurance. It is the agent's job, which you through your HOA dues paid for, to provide that proof to you. You shouldn't be registering with icerts. They say so in the first sentence on the registration page: Unit Owners, Do Not Register Here! If you own an existing property,   and have received a letter from your lender requiring an annual   renewal/updated certificate for an association that has recently   expired, please forward that letter to info@iCerts.com to receive   instructions to place your order. If your request is a new loan of any   kind, please contact your lender and request that they either contact   us to place this order, or register below. So you can try that route (sending an email to info@icerts.com), and see if it works. It does cost money, in the range of $20-$100 (I used a different similar service at the time and they charged $75 for this). If it doesn't, you can try and work with the insurance agent. There are some ways to persuade them: California has very strong traditions of consumer protections. In this case, I suggest checking out this site. Let the insurance agent know that as the HOA member - they're working for you, and that in the next HOA meeting you will raise a request to change the insurance agency. Also, remind the agent that the CA Insurance Commission will knock on their doors to ask why they don't provide you with the proof you need. If the HOA management company doesn't help you, you can remind them that they too can be fired. This can be done, and isn't even all that hard. There's a lot of competition in the HOA management market, and it wouldn't be too hard to find a new management company. The HOA management company should have provided you the proof of coverage when they renewed the policy. "I had a similar issue take place at a hospital when the repeatedly billed the ""wrong me"" -- a stale insurance record left behind from when I was a dependent on my parent's insurance a decade earlier. They ended up billing me for anesthesia when I had a major surgery (everything else was billed to the correct insurance.) The outsourced billing people were pretty unhelpful (not usually the case with hospitals), so I became the squeaky wheel. I sent certified letters, had my priest rattle the cage (it was a Catholic hospital) and eventually talked myself into a meeting with the VP of Finance, who started paying attention when the incompetence of his folks became apparent. Total cost: $0 + my time." This is going to be a philosophical answer, but here it goes.  What is the purpose of an insurance? In my perspective, insurance is a way to protect yourself from risks in life you can not afford to take. Following this principle, most of the people do not have enough money to fix a Ferrari, or pay the medical expenses of a third party--so insurance against liabilities makes financial sense, but many can afford buying an equivalent car as they are insuring.  If you have enough money to buy an equivalent car, you are paying for a risk you can take yourself. Then, instead of paying the comprehensive fee which is used to pay the different accidents, the company's administrative fees and the shareholder profits; I would save your money in a separate account and use it as a self-insurance. That is at least what I do.  I even put other insurances and extended warranties, which respective risks I have decided to absorve; that way I diversify my fund. Why would you want the company who failed to be the one monitoring your credit?   Bankrupt them and be done with them. They're likely going to be sued into insolvency and that in turn should create an about-face to the other credit companies.    The last thing anyone should want is giving additional or further responsibility to a company with the largest personal information leak of all time.