Warranties fail quietly. Nobody gets a notification when coverage lapses, and the paperwork that proves it existed is usually in an email from an installer three inboxes ago. By the time a water heater fails, the question is not whether it was covered but whether anyone can find out.
Three ways coverage gets lost
The receipt goes missing. Most manufacturer warranties require proof of purchase and installation date. Without it, a valid claim is unprovable.
Nobody tracks the expiry. A five-year warranty bought in a busy month is invisible until year six, when it is too late to matter.
It does not survive a sale. Transferable coverage is worth real money to a buyer, but only if someone hands it over. Otherwise it evaporates at closing.
What actually fixes it
The fix is unglamorous: record the asset once, attach the receipt, store the coverage term with a date attached, and keep it with the property rather than with the person. Then coverage is a property fact rather than something you have to remember.
That also makes the handoff trivial. Instead of assembling a folder in the week before closing, the record is already complete and simply changes hands.