5 Types of Insurance You Really Don't Need
When buying plane tickets recently on a major travel site, I was confronted with an offer to buy "travel insurance" for my trip. Digging deeper, I discovered that this insurance policy would reimburse me the cost of the tickets if I canceled because of illness (any other reason for canceling wouldn't fly -- pardon the pun). Niche insurance products like this have proliferated in recent decades, playing on our fear of the future in order to separate us from our money.
Buy any kind of electronic device, from cameras to refrigerators, and the seller will eagerly offer you an extended warranty in case the product fails or needs repairs after the basic warranty expires. These policies almost never pay off; even if the product does fail during the extended warranty period, the cost you'd pay for repairs is often less than the cost of the warranty. A Consumer Reports study on extended warranties for automobiles found that 55% of warranty purchasers never used the policy, and the ones who did spent far more on average to pay for the policy than they saved on the repairs it covered.
Image source: Getty Images.
Source: Fool.com
