Ditto!
Also quite ironic an app based bank thinks offering a package containing mobile phone insurance is a waste of money…
Because mobile phone insurance is mostly a scam, and claiming it is a horrible experience anyway?
Just make your own “insurance” by putting 10£/month into a pot. Plus you won’t need to pay any “excess” and claiming this insurance is as easy as going to any phone shop and buying a new phone with your Monzo - no need to wait for ages for them to process your claim and tell you they can only give you “market value” for your broken phone.
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£10 a month in a pot? To “insure” an iPhone X? You’d need that just for the excess.
That’s the attraction of most joint accounts, the bundled benefits are actually really good value. I think even when joint accounts are released, we’ll just use Monzo for day to day spending and a benefited joint account for fixed outgoings that we can forget about.
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That depends a lot on your personal circumstances:
Let’s do some quick math:
x is the number of left hands you have
y is the number of under 18 year olds in your house.
If x + y > 1 there is a 90% chance, that £10/month won’t be enough!
If x + y > 2 This chance rises to 99.9%
If x + y > 3. mobile phone insurance (especially the bundled type that covers all phones in your household for a set price) is suddenly a very good deal! 
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plus* for ÂŁ3 more with some banks you also get travel insurance and breakdown cover!
Having used both the travel insurance and breakdown cover… £13 is good value.
*edit plus symbol came up as a bullet point…
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@anon23935806 Not everyone lives in a world where things like that are possible. When you have a mortgage, family and children, not everything is as black and white as you always try to make out. What works for you, wont for a number of other people.
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So my account fee with Nationwide is ÂŁ13/month this gives me:
- Cover for travel insurance including domestic travel
- Mobile phone insurance with ÂŁ50 excess for 2 iPhone 8 Plus
- Breakdown cover on any car I sit in
My research comes at the following prices:
- RAC Cover (with work discount and same level of cover for 2 cars as it’s per car not person) - £16 pm
- mobile phone insurance - for 2 phones with same excess comes in around ÂŁ22 pm
- travel insurance for family of 4 including domestic - ÂŁ10 pm
So my packaged account is vey reasonable in comparison
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Off topic but it surprises me phone insurance is so expensive? I usually buy refurbished iPhones and they usually give me a free warranty of a year- and travel insurance for a month is like £8 that I usually buy only if I need it, or £20+ for a whole year. I understand car insurance is another matter to be able to drive on the road, but I haven’t needed phone insurance at all and wouldn’t pay £20+/ month for it. Unless it came in some sort of amazing phone contract.
Because it sells. The price of something is often based on how much people are prepared to pay for it. When someone buys a 1k£ like the iPhone X for example, 20£/month insurance (even though it’s a scam given there is often a huge excess hidden in the fine print) sounds like a good deal.
This combined with the fact people often buy phones they can’t really afford thanks to contracts which split the payments over 12 or 24 months make the insurance an easy sale as those people will just not be able to afford a replacement in the unlikely event they break it and are thus super scared.
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It’s not exactly a scam, since every insurer is pretty up front about excess, and yes the trend for phones now seem to be leaning towards £100 excess. But if I buy a phone for £1k, and then my daughter throws it against a wall because YouTube isn’t loading quickly enough, I’m probably going to need a new/refurbished one. That’s the whole point of insurance, I don’t need to be able to afford a new one.
Your scenario of walking back into the Apple Store to buy a new one with a £10 a month pot that’s rumbling on in the background sounds like a pipe dream, unless you don’t have an accident in 8 years.
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Do you not change phones every 2-3 years though? By the time my warranty is pretty much up, I’ve already got my eye on another phone. I get teenagers are accident-prone, though. If there is a general family cover and it works out being cheaper for everyone then I have no complaints about that. But if I were to buy insurance it would just be for me and it’s not worth it.
P.s. My parents wouldn’t let me buy a new phone if I spoilt it deliberately/ was stupidly careless until my contract was up, so I used a crappy Nokia phone for a year after I smashed my iPhone 3Gs screen on some rocks. I knew I shouldn’t have taken it out while cycling and I deserved it.
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Putting the whole “scam” rhetoric aside, there are a few things to consider here:
Nationwide’s insurance is not the legally required car insurance. It’s break down insurance. Different thing 
Travel insurance: Costs differ drastically for single people and families. A few years ago I would’ve also paid ca. £20-50 p.a. for it. Now we are two adults, two kids. And you are easily looking at £150 p.a. (ca £12 per month) and more.
Phone insurance: I have alluded to this before: For a lot of people it’s probably not interesting. If you are reasonably careful with your phone, put a good case on it, you may only break your phone once every 5 years, meaning the monthly cost of your phone is £1000 / 5 years = £16 per month. Given that most people change their phone more frequently anyways, it’s probably not financially clever in that case to buy phone insurance.
Living at the opposite end of the scale: Again, a family with two adults and two kids may have 4 phones in the household. The kids may not be particularly careful with their phones (or their parents’ phones, for that matter), so you may need to replace a phone every year. In that case you are probably not going to buy an iPhone X for your kids, so lets assume £500 / year = £40 per month.
Now, in the example of the nationwide account:
£13 per month on Nationwide’s packaged account buys you travel insurance for the whole family, and phone insurance for the whole family.
Now, with my back of the envelope type calculation that compares to:
- ÂŁ12 per month travel insurance
- ÂŁ40 per month to put aside for new phones.
ÂŁ13 per months now sounds financially wise to me.
I suspect a lot of families will somewhere between these two extremes. But keep in mind that insurances always boil down to your personal circumstances, and your appetite to risk. In this case: Do you travel a lot? Do you have an old car that’s likely to break down? Do you break many phones? If the answer to all of these questions is “no” then taking out this sort of insurance makes no sense. But that doesn’t make the insurance a scam!
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I think this was what I had in mind in my last few replies- it’s not much use for me since I am just one person and it works out cheaper for me to buy one-off travel insurance/ I get a warranty for a year and just make sure I’m not careless with my belongings.
I was just surprised that phone insurance seems awfully expensive since it’s been referenced on forums before, I assumed it would be something that would be provided as part of a phone contract without having to take out an additional cover with your bank. Every time it’s been brought up it’s no small sum. 
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Unless I’m missing something, warranty isn’t the same as insurance. Warranty is for stuff that goes wrong with the handset that shouldn’t do due to the device, in the first year. Insurance covers against accidental damage, loss etc depending on the cover.
I tend to change phones every year, which realistically is a bigger problem than choosing whether to get insurance or not 
Feel we may have drifted way off topic here!
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For a lot of people it’s probably not interesting. If you are reasonably careful with your phone, put a good case on it, you may only break your phone once every 5 years, meaning the monthly cost of your phone is £1000 / 5 years = £16 per month. Given that most people change their phone more frequently anyways, it’s probably not financially clever in that case to buy phone insurance.
Even better, if you do damage your phone, unless you completely destroy it in multiple pieces, the out-of-warranty replacement prices at worst half of what the phone originally cost. Here are Apple’s prices for example. iPhone X screen-only replacement is 286£ (which is the most likely damage you’ll get), and “other damage” (back glass, bending, etc) is 556£. With these prices in mind I think insurance makes even less sense.
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Fully agree with you. It ridiculously expensive and financially only makes sense for the most careless or extremely risk averse people to buy phone insurance separately. But we were talking about packaged accounts here, where it can represent seriously good value, especially for families.
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Ridiculous how expensive the iPhone X screen repair is compared to the rest! Thanks for the link though, does give you some food for thought. If say you were on an annual phone cycle with an iPhone 8 equivalent. The ÂŁ10 pot thing might just work!
For you, that may well be the case. For me too.
But firstly, saying “it doesn’t make sense” is a world of a difference to saying “it’s a scam”, and secondly: Everybody is different. I think that’s the problem with insurances: That people often buy them when they shouldn’t.
It’s obvious that with every insurance the insured pay more than they get back from their insurance, on average. Else the insurance would go out of business. But that doesn’t make the insurance a scam. It just means some insurances don’t make sense for everybody.
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I’ve cracked my screen twice and often you can bring up an unrelated fault (usually with the battery) to get the whole phone replaced 
I think as an individual it would be more worth it to get Apple Care- that would work out cheaper since it covers you for two years. I think I got a year’s worth of free Apple Care when I purchased my Macbook, so extending that wouldn’t cost much at all vs monthly insurance
I think insurance isn’t worth it until an accident happens to you and you feel validated that you did in fact buy it. That’s how insurance works I guess
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It’s not a scam, and insurers are required to clearly display the possible excess values before a policy is sold. Regulatory requirement.
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