Remember your warranties before they expire.

A manufacturer warranty is a promise from the maker, and it is separate from your legal rights against the retailer. Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, goods must be of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose and as described. If they are not, your claim is against the shop that sold it to you, not the manufacturer.

That matters because the timescales are different. A one year warranty expiring does not mean you have no recourse. The time limit for bringing a claim through the courts is six years in England, Wales and Northern Ireland under the Limitation Act 1980, and five years in Scotland. That is a deadline for legal action rather than a guarantee the goods will be covered for that long. For anything over six months old the burden falls on you to show the fault was there from the start, which is harder but far from impossible for expensive items that failed early.

So the practical position is that a warranty is the easy route while it lasts, and your statutory rights are the fallback afterwards. Knowing which one applies is much easier when you still have the purchase date and the receipt.

Almost every warranty and every statutory claim depends on proving when you bought the item and what you paid. Thermal till receipts fade to blank within a couple of years, which is comfortably inside the window you might need them. Email confirmations survive better but get buried, and the retailer's order history only helps if the account still exists.

Photographing or scanning the receipt at the point of purchase is a thirty second habit that solves this permanently. Store it with the purchase date, the retailer, the price and the model or serial number, since warranty claims are usually processed against a serial rather than a name.

For larger items it is also worth keeping the installation date rather than only the purchase date. Boilers, kitchen appliances and anything fitted professionally often have warranties that run from installation, and many require proof of annual servicing to stay valid.

Extended warranties are sold at the till because that is the moment you feel most invested in the purchase and least inclined to do arithmetic. They are frequently priced at a large fraction of the item's value for cover that overlaps heavily with what you already have.

Before buying one, check three things. Your contents insurance may already cover accidental damage for the item. Your credit card may add protection, and Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act makes the card provider jointly liable for purchases between £100 and £30,000 made on a credit card. And your statutory rights already cover goods that fail earlier than they reasonably should.

Where an extended warranty does earn its price is on items that are expensive to repair, heavily used and where failure is genuinely common. For most electronics bought new, the odds do not favour it.

The frustrating pattern with warranties is noticing a developing fault, deciding it is not bad enough to bother with, and then discovering the cover ended two months ago when it finally fails properly. Intermittent faults are especially prone to this, since each individual occurrence feels too minor to act on.

A reminder a month before the warranty ends turns that around. It is a prompt to look at the item deliberately and ask whether anything has been slightly off. A washing machine that has started making a new noise, a laptop battery that is not lasting, a boiler that needs resetting occasionally. Raising it while cover is live is straightforward. Raising it afterwards is an argument.

It is also the moment to decide whether to renew any service plan, and to record the item's details somewhere you will find them if it fails later.