“You’ll probably be asked to sign a three-year monitoring contract. You may be able to get that down to two years. Remember, after your monitoring contract expires, you are free to change companies. Before you sign that contract, look for two important words – automatic renewal – words that could come back to bite you at the end of the term.
Dennis and Alicia learned that the hard way. They got their alarm system for almost nothing. In return they had to buy the monitoring service for three years.
Dennis figured their commitment would be over in three years,”then if we wanted we would be able to renew.”
But he says, three years later when he called the company to say they no longer wanted the monitoring service, the company told him, “sorry, the contract was automatically renewed for another three years at the original price.”
The alarm company explained they were out of luck because they hadn’t cancelled in writing at least 60 days before the contract expired, as was spelled out in the fine print.
Automatic renewal clauses are very common with burglar alarm monitoring. The industry says it helps them cut down on paperwork costs.”