It goes to show how differing people’s views are on insurance and the value they place on it. You pay £132 a year on the chance something happens to your phone, and then even at that point you’d still have to pay £50 to get it sorted.
I totally respect your choice but to me that seems crazy. I’m aware I’m at the other end of the spectrum. I pay £3 a month for travel insurance via work, but I have no other insurance for anything. My last phone finally died after nearly 4 years so I just went and bought a new one. Unless it gets stolen, the only thing I guess may break will be the screen, and I’m sure that’s about a £60 fix these days.
Out of interest - how many claims per year have you made in the last 3 years?
True. But that’s the way with insurance. Travel insurance. Home insurance. AA cover. etc etc.
I have AppleCare for my iPhone. £200 I think it was and that will mean a £25 excess if the screen smashes or something. That’s for 2 years.
The trouble with a lot of these insurance for phones is that they are shoddy. You don’t get an appointment at Apple and they do it for you and you walk out and your insurer takes care of it.
You post it off, if you’re lucky they get it the next day and send it back the same day, that’s 3 days without a phone. I can’t be uncontactable for that long.
£100 a year to mean that I can go to Apple this afternoon and have my phone replaced is a worthwhile cost for me.
The only issue is if I lose it. But then I have home insurance to cover that.
Absolutely no way I’d pay more to Monzo for a worse insurance offering. Even if it was £5 a month, I’m still sticking with AppleCare.
Not to mention that the repair facilities used by insurance companies very rarely use genuine parts, which will at best crater the resale value of the phone and at worst be unreliable and dangerous.
I think what this topic is illustrating is that there’s a huge variety in why people consider ‘value’ from a mobile insurance policy. So bundling one into a bank account is probably a bad idea as it’s very difficult to find one that suits a majority of people enough to make it a decent selling point.
I’d rather the ‘extras’ on my premium bank account were things linked to how my bank account works. If I want phone insurance I’ll go to a specialist phone insurance provider.
I get the feeling that there are two types of people who buy phone insurance:
The cack-handed eejits who are always dropping/breaking/losing their phones. They buy the insurance because they pretty much know something will go wrong at some point.
The paranoid careful, who are worried something will happen to their phone so they’d best protect it, just in case. Nothing ever does happen because they’re always far too careful - but they just don’t feel comfortable not having the insurance.
I’d say that set 2 are pretty much subsidising both set 1 and making the profits for the insurance company.
The in-between group does the maths, realises what they’ll be spending over the expected life of a phone, and takes the bet that putting their money into their savings instead is a better use of the money. If nothing goes wrong? That’s ~£400 you’ve potentially grown into a larger sum over the years you’ve had the phone. If something goes wrong? Savings will cover it, and you’ll be extra careful next time, no?
It’s a tricky business, insurance. Because on a macro scale, that argument could apply to all insurance.
The trick is figuring out where you can cover losses and where you can’t, and purchasing appropriate insurance. Personally, I struggle to see where specialist phone insurance falls on the ‘appropriate’ side.
An insurance product is a way for you to pay someone else to take a risk away from you. Generally speaking, that only makes sense if you can’t afford the risk yourself.
So, for travel insurance, where you can’t afford the cost of intensive care abroad, or a special medical repatriation to get you home, insurance makes sense. The cost might be millions.
When your house and everything you own might burn to the ground leaving you in financial ruin, home insurance makes sense. The cost is likely to be tens or hundreds of thousands.
Car insurance is mandatory because of the risk you causes hugely expensive damage to 3rd parties, and could run into the millions, particularly if you leave someone with life long injuries.
Breakdown cover, extended warranties, gadget insurance, etc can be quite a different concept. Usually, in these situations, people could afford the cost of repair or replacement, even if that replacement wasn’t like for like (ie you might not be able to buy another iPhone 11 Pro Max, but you probably could pick up an old iPhone 8). So you have to stop and ask yourself why you’re paying someone else to take on a risk that’s possibly fairly insignificant to you in the first place.
That’s why I didn’t mention car insurance as you have to have that.
You’re right that it’s the gamble of needing it vs can you afford it if it goes wrong. Hence why I didn’t bother with the extended warranty for a fridge.
But some people deem it unlikely they’ll need home insurance, travel insurance or breakdown etc, to varying degrees of risk and reward.
This should be where the “Marketplace” idea comes in, a few approved insurers that can be bought and managed through the monzo app.
Monzo get their cut from either:
Fee from Insurers looking to become approved to the marketplace and being offered to 4m+ people
A referral % cut that comes from the insurer for signups not blatantly from the offer from the insurer ( meaning i could go direct to the insurer and get a better deal)
Whats in it for the customer?
Good trusted coverage from companies signed off almost by Monzo.
Monzo could potentially track claim ids, renewal dates etc in app to make it more seamless
It’s tricky… I only had insurance on this phone for almost two years now with no claims but my last phone i completely destroyed after a few months so I’m thinking swings and roundabouts, I could probably go without the insurance but what if i need it
Do as @HoldenCarver suggested above Put what you normally would pay on insurance into a pot and have it as an emergency fund with the added bonus that it also makes you interest.
So in your case, if you haven’t claimed in over 2 years that should be a nice tidy sum you’ve saved
Another thing to consider is not just the cost of repair, but the falling cost of your phone.
My iPhone was £1100ish + AppleCare nearly 3 years ago. At the time, what made me decide to get AppleCare, wasn’t just the cost of the screen, but the cost of any other repair as the back is glass too.
Put what you normally would pay on insurance into a pot and have it as an emergency fund with the added bonus that it also makes you interest. 
