How are we all feeling about having pet insurance?

We have pugs. We simply budget for the couple grand a year rather than the minimal coverage provided by pet insurance coverage for these ridiculous brachiocelaphic animals.

The insurance company makes money overall

Insurance is never a good investment for guaranteed routine care (for people or animals). You’re paying a middleman to mitigate a 100% risk. The math doesn’t math, and never will. So set aside checkups and vaccines.

It’s about emergency care and end of life care, and this is a deeply personal decision.

Some people want to do every last surgery possible, utilize mobility devices, etc. Others decide to accept it’s time to say goodbye.

I have always had pet insurance for my dogs. It’s saved me thousands when my dog needed emergency surgery for a bladder issue. Bill was $13,690 and I only paid $600. My dogs have Trupanion

I’ve never regretted it. My lab needed an emergency surgery, with a bill of about 8k. That was closely followed by my other dog needing care, about 5k. Our insurance covered it, with a 90% reimbursement in two days. The problem with saving, for me, is the time frame between when I use it and when I would have that amount again. I don’t make much, so it would take me a long time to save up 13k to have sitting around.

At first I thought it was worth it, but then it began to increase and with 2 dogs it was a lot every month. I don’t even have health insurance for myself because I can’t afford it.

We always buy pet insurance now, as soon as possible after adopting said dog.

We learned our lesson after having a dog who developed Addison’s disease about a year after we adopted her. She lived many years after that, and we spent approximately $300/month on her treatments. This would have been covered by pet insurance if only we had purchased it before she developed the disease.

My sister recently spent several thousand getting her otherwise young and healthy dog’s spleen removed after an injury sustained from playing too hard.

One of our current dogs contracted heartworm (despite being on preventives since we adopted her – probably contracted it before that but still tested negative while in foster care). But, since we had the insurance, the very expensive treatment, follow up testing & imaging, etc was covered by insurance. This coverage far surpassed what we spent in premiums. We use Lemonade pet insurance, by the way. By far the cheapest we have found.

So the insurance is good for the unexpected and extremely expensive things that come up. What many people don’t realize is that it is almost never good for anything preventative or anything that is related to a pre-existing condition, so you will still need separate savings for those things. Plus savings to cover any deductible.

Here’s how I look at it – if I imagine a scenario where the only thing stopping me from getting my dog treated is the cost, I would feel terrible not doing it. That’s why we get insurance. Once our dogs get old and frail, we will probably consider dropping the insurance because at that point, any sort of expensive treatment will probably be more uncomfortable for them than it’s really worth, and it’d probably be better to say goodbye.

In your situation, with a cat, who I’m guessing stays inside and isn’t at risk of getting in a fight or hit by a car, and you’d prefer to put them to sleep vs treatment for some major illness (no judgement btw), then I’d probably not get insurance.

We have it for our two cats and dog. The dog was diagnosed with a chronic illness at 1 year old, so we’re very grateful to have the insurance for her to cover her monthly injections and daily meds. It also made a huge dent in the emergency stay she required when she was first diagnosed: a $5k bill resulted in less than $1k in costs for us. I think if you’re well enough off to put away about $10k per pet before acquiring the pets, then you can pass on insurance. But if not, it’s nice to have that assurance that if a catastrophe hits, you’ll be able to not go into debt for the sake of keeping your pet alive. The idea of choosing between money and medical care for my animals is also heartbreaking to me, so insurance helps there, too.