Best way to insure EVO 4G LTE? - Sprint HTC EVO 4G LTE

In light of TEP going up, what is the best way to insure our phones? With TEP, it looks like if we keep the phone the full 2 years, it will cost ~$264 in premiums plus a $150 deductible per occurence. With just one replacement, that will be $414 over the life of the phone.
At that point, you might as well just replace the EVO LTE out of pocket, as the price should be in that range after about a year or so.
Are there any good alternatives? I am starting to consider SquareTrade. A full two year replacement policy is only $96.50, with no deductibles.
Has anyone had any experience with SquareTrade? Or do you know of any other cell phone insurance programs that would be a good alternative to TEP?

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rdeets said:
In light of TEP going up, what is the best way to insure our phones? With TEP, it looks like if we keep the phone the full 2 years, it will cost ~$264 in premiums plus a $150 deductible per occurence. With just one replacement, that will be $414 over the life of the phone.
At that point, you might as well just replace the EVO LTE out of pocket, as the price should be in that range after about a year or so.
Are there any good alternatives? I am starting to consider SquareTrade. A full two year replacement policy is only $96.50, with no deductibles.
Has anyone had any experience with SquareTrade? Or do you know of any other cell phone insurance programs that would be a good alternative to TEP?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1649567

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Mathman85 said:
I've been meaning to write this to post somewhere... saw this thread and thought it would be a good opportunity.
Why Total Equipment Protection is Probably a Waste of Money
(Unless You’re EXTREMELY Prone to Breaking Phones or Won’t Buy Used)
I have a Master of Science in Mathematics with a concentration in Statistics, a post-baccalaureate certificate in Applied Mathematics, and I did my undergraduate thesis on Game Theory with a section on Utility Theory. Simply put, I’ve based much of my education on how to make rational decisions, and I do so professionally, now. This is a Game Theory/Utility Theory approach to answering the very question posed in this thread.
First things first: we need a payoff matrix that addresses all the possible outcomes of our decision. On our end, we can either buy TEP for $8 a month (assume the entire two-year contract, so a total of $192), or we don’t. (Note that, as of 6/17/2012, the monthly rate will be $11, and the deductible can go as high as $200. I will address this later.) The part we don’t know is whether or not we’ll break our phones. Additionally, if we do break our phones, we don’t know how many times they’ll break. So the task is to generalize this decision strategy for all circumstances, and then you can make a decision about buying TEP based on whether or not you think you’re likely enough to use it.
Let k be the number of times we break our phone.
Let x be the cost of replacing the phone without TEP.
If we insure the phone and it breaks, the payout is -192-100k. ($192 for TEP over two years, $100 deductible for each phone)
If we insure the phone and it doesn’t break, the payout is –192.
If we don’t insure the phone and it breaks, the payout is –xk.
If we don’t insure the phone and it doesn’t break, the payout is 0.
So we get:
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Now, the key to determining the optimal strategy is to determine at what point we become indifferent between our available strategies. So if we let p represent the probability of breaking our phones (k times), we generate the following equation:
Since we want to know what the probability of breaking our phone would have to be in order to justify TEP, we solve for p:
Now that we have a formula, let’s consider some situations.
Suppose you’re only likely to break your phone once over the two years of your contract (k=1), and that you would replace it with a brand new EVO 4G LTE ($550). Then:
This means that, if there was a 42.7% chance of breaking your phone once, and you’d replace it with a new EVO, your expected payoff is the same whether you go with TEP or not. Now that we know that, we can conclude the following. If you are more than 42.7% likely to break your EVO once, and you’d replace it with a new EVO, you should get TEP.
Now that you’re saying “wait, I’d never replace it with a brand new phone,” let’s assume that a used one would cost you $300.
That’s right—if you could find a replacement for $300, you’d have to be more than 96% likely to break your phone for TEP to be worth it. Mathematically, you can also show that if you can find a replacement for less than $292, you should absolutely NOT buy TEP, assuming you’d only break your phone once over two years—TEP becomes a strictly dominated strategy. To demonstrate:
As you can see, there is no outcome where TEP costs less.
Now let’s look at the formula again.
The variable k, which represents the number of times we break the phone, is just a multiplier for the denominator. What this means is, if you were to break the phone twice, the probability of doing so would have to be half of what it was if you broke it once to be indifferent. So if you were to replace two broken phones with two new EVOs, the probability of doing this would only need to be higher than 42.7%/2 = 21.35% for TEP to be the smart decision. If you were to replace the broken phones with used ones that cost $300, the probability would have to be higher than 48% (96%/2) for this to be the rational choice. And for TEP to never make sense (p>1), you’d have to find used phones whose average cost was less than $196. If you were to break your phone thrice, you should invest in a case. And probably insurance, too.
Now let’s briefly look at what is going to happen on June 17th, when Sprint raises rates. We’ll assume the $200 deductible for the EVO 4G LTE, since it’s a premier device. (If you want to assume otherwise, it only changes the denominator to -150 instead of -200.)
To save space, the same algebra as earlier results in:
If you were to break your phone once, you’d have to find a phone that costs less than $464 for TEP to be a dominated strategy. Surely a used EVO 4G LTE will cost less than this.
If you were to replace it with a brand new $550 EVO 4G LTE, you’d have to be more than 75.4% likely to break your phone to justify TEP.
ONLY YOU can determine for yourself whether TEP is a good idea, because only you know how prone to breaking phones you are. In a decade of owning a mobile phone, I’ve never had one break. So I would consider the likelihood of me breaking a phone to be so low that TEP is more likely to cost me money than to save me money. I’m certainly not likely to break multiple phones. Hell, I dropped my EVO 4G onto a stone walkway as I pulled it from my pocket two nights ago, for the first time since I’ve owned it (a year and eight months). Literally, as of me writing this, two nights ago. I don’t have anything more than a Zagg shield on it, and it didn’t break. So I’m not doing TEP. If you’ve broken a few phones in your day, do the math. How much do you think you can find a used EVO 4G LTE for? What is YOUR probability of breaking one phone in a two year contract? (The number of broken phones divided by number of two year contracts you’ve signed [or the number of years you’ve had a mobile phone divided by two].) These aren’t hard calculations to do, and taking a few minutes to work with them can save you a lot of money.
And there’s another factor for you to consider personally—is it easier for you to pay $8 a month and a $100 deductible than the cost of a replacement phone all at once? If you don’t have a credit card or a good financial cushion, perhaps dropping $300 on a used phone is scary to you. But in that case, I’d put my $8 a month into a savings account to soften the blow if a phone did break on me, and I’d buy a case to decrease that probability. At least then, if it doesn’t break, it’s still my money.
In conclusion, I’ll remind you of the two formulas, and urge you to take a few minutes thinking about this, before throwing your money away.
If you’re reading this prior to 6/17/2012:
If you’re reading this on or after 6/17/2012:
If you determine the probability of breaking your phone k times and replacing it with a phone that costs x is higher than p, then get TEP. Otherwise, don’t.
Note: 6/17 TEP info from here.
Click to expand...
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http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1651507&page=3
best write up I've seen anywhere. make sure you thank him.

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Wow. That is an awesome analysis of TEP. I was thinking about doing Ensquared'smobile insurance policy. I can't access squaretrade's website to compare but I'm pretty sure Squaretrade has a set limit for the amount they will pay for claims, and when you reach your limit you are pretty much out of luck. Anybody have experience with either?

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Drewh1991 said:
Wow. That is an awesome analysis of TEP. I was thinking about doing Ensquared'smobile insurance policy. I can't access squaretrade's website to compare but I'm pretty sure Squaretrade has a set limit for the amount they will pay for claims, and when you reach your limit you are pretty much out of luck. Anybody have experience with either?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm also considering Ensquared, but haven't heard a peep from anyone here regarding them. The price is lower, the deductible is lower, the maximum coverage is higher... seems like a winner to me!