Obtaining what we keep in our home takes a lot of time and money. We work hard for our income, and we have learned to make wise financial decisions, including what products to purchase and keep in our home. The problem is that the more we keep, the more attractive it appears to potential burglars. We want to protect our purchases as much as our home itself. Therefore, we make one extremely important monthly payment for a service that we pray we will never need, but we will gladly pay for it. We consider payments for alarm monitoring service an investment in our home.
A past break-in
During our first two years of marriage, my wife and I lived in a very nice apartment complex. We loved our second-floor apartment and felt secure in its height off the ground; no one could see in through the windows. However, one night we came home from a night out to find our door unlocked. We both remembered checking the door as we left and noticing it locked, so we wondered. As we went inside, we found some of my cash and my wife’s jewelry spread out on the bed but nothing missing. We checked the entire apartment before calling the police so we would know what to tell them on the phone. Only my cup full of change had disappeared, so we figured that a kid had broken in. The apartment manager would not allow us to install an alarm, system, but we vowed that when we bought a house, we would have one installed.
Purchasing the alarm system
We kept our self promise as soon as we bought our house in 1997. We shopped the companies in the area and chose the best we could find. We received a free system with a two-year service and monitoring agreement. We paid only $106 dollars for the phone connection to the system. For only $23.49 per month, we have round-the-clock monitoring. We have the payment scheduled as an automatic electronic bill pay to ensure that we never miss it. Since 1997, we have never had a payment increase, and we have had to make only one paid service call – only because we installed new windows – so we had to reconnect the contacts.
False alarms are okay with us
Since we purchased the alarm system in 1997, we have had a few false alarms. One time, the inclement weather interfered with the alarm contacts’ magnetic field. We both worked, so we could not turn off the alarm. I drove home after school to see two officers examining around our house. They explained that they had twelve alarms in our section of town go off that same day for the same reason. We received a false alarm notice but no fine. In a recent incident, while we were out, a neighbor knocked on our door. We had not closed the door all the way, so his knock pushed the door open and set off the alarm. I did not receive any penalty for this one, but I could and probably should have.
Peace of mind
In either case, we would have gladly paid a false-alarm fine to know that our alarm worked, the monitoring company did its job, and the police came quickly to investigate. We highly recommend that every home owner invest in a good alarm system and monitoring company. We never again want to come home to find our possessions laid out or missing or – even worse – find someone in our home! That $23.49 every month is well worth the cost to ensure that our home, our pets, and all of our possessions for which we paid so much are very well protected.
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