Would you cancel your pets insurance at a certain age?

[TanaFrench]

My dog is 13 and has insurance. I was always going to just keep her insured until the day she passes (and I still might). But recently I have heard quite a few people say that they cancelled theirs once their pet got to a certain age because at that point if anything major happened they wouldn’t put them through it. I thought that was a good point, but I’m worried and still feel like I would keep it just in case. I wouldn’t cancel at 13 anyway. Maybe at about 16, if she made it to that age.

So I am just curious about what other people do. Do you keep your pet insurance forever or is it pointless once they are elderly? And if so, at what age would you cancel it?

If you choose not to pay put the money in savings each month. That way you have something to use if needed but if not you have a little nest egg to spend .

I’ve only had cats and I think they are cheaper than dogs but I would cancel it in your circumstances and put the £100 aside each month.

but then I’m a little biased because I think pet insurance has warped a lot of things and encouraged us to keep treating things that aren’t in animals interest. Anything that required frequent vets visits or anaesthetic I would probably put to sleep at 13. Not because of costs but because I wouldn’t want my pet to spend its last months distressed and in pain when it has no concept of the future.

Horrifying attitude: I’ll enjoy the good bits and then discard them when they need care.
Please don’t ever get pets. You don’t deserve them.
You and all irresponsible owners like you are the reason charities are at breaking point, vet professionals have a high rate of suicide and so many animals get put to sleep unnecessarily.

Oh please.
UK is unlike many other countries plagued with cronically ill and degormed dogs that are bred for profit. And vets keep them alive for profit.
If you have red my first reply you would have seen I took my pets abroad for surgeries.
But no, I would not want a decade or more of expenses and extra care for an animal that should not exist in the first place.

On unrelated note, yes vets, dostors and dentists have high suicide rate.
Almost like demanding and stressfull profession like that should not be entered because: "my parents did it", "it is career of good standing" or "it surelly will pay well at some point".

Probably at some point but not sure when, I'm still paying for my 13 year old cat and can't see it changing anytime soon. It's more just incase she develops a condition that doesn't affect her quality of life but is expensive to treat or she has an accident and needs treating because she's still youngish for a cat.

As she ages I will have to weigh up how much the insurance is, how much I would have to spend if something went wrong without insurance and how much I would spend on treating her if she was elderly.

I don't think putting an elderly cat through surgery is the right thing to do but it's difficult to define elderly and it also depends what it's for.

It's hard when it's your own pet and I do think we (society) keep them alive longer than we should because we are selfish and don't want to part with them. It's hard saying goodbye and it's natural to try and cling on to that life as long as possible.

I also think insurance has caused vets bills to increase dramatically but we probably do treat more "minor" things than we did. I'm thinking things like broken legs, was there a time when something like a cat or a dog was immediately PTS because of it instead of fixing or have we always treated things like that?

A lot of minor conditions are cheaper to treat than you might think.

My cat has arthritis and his medication is £24 a month - it's much cheaper to pay that direct than paying for insurance, plus an excess, plus a percentage his bills now he's a senior boy.

Some people don't agree with keeping animals going for years with loads of medication, too.

@Pickingmyselfup at 13 your cat is elderly already. Most are consider elderly at 10+.

I have worked in vet med for 4 years as a care assistant/receptionist and currently work at an emergency practice, the past week I’ve had numerous people state they cancelled their older pets insurance weeks/two months before their visits this week. Unfortunately, many of them are now on consent payment treatments for minor ailments as they did not have the security there to pay for the necessary hospitalisation as they hadn’t “built up a pot” yet after cancelling the insurance. While I can appreciate an older pet you need to look at quality of life over quantity of life, a lot of older pets are still more than healthy to go for many years with minor treatments or ongoing treatments which are a monthly expensive you’d expect when they are around 80 in humans years.
my advice would be to ensure you have enough for both out of hours treatments as well as routine vet visits before considering the insurance change, as a consult at a referral/OOH clinic unfortunately can be in the £200-300 mark before any treatment which would be covered via insurance

Pet plan are pretty good at paying out, if the pet has to be pts due to a medical condition/emergency visit then they will cover the hospitalisation/treatment/sedation and euthanasia in majority of policies (do check your individual policy)however as cremation is a personal choice as with whether it is communal or individual and what type of urn/keepsakes you’d like. Clinics have to use external companies so that typically is not paid out via insurance as it’s deemed a more personal choice but do check your policy! However, many insurances will also pay out the cost you paid for puppy/kitten as you’d have told them when you signed up to the policy how much he/she cost you x

I would say it would totally depend on your personal circumstances. Insurance is gambling. When we got our second dog, the quote to pay for two 8+ year old dogs went up ridiculously. We chose to cancel insurance and put money in an account instead. But I also knew that if something significant were to happen we could afford to pay out too. My logic was actually that the repayments for a loan for any major treatment would balance out insurance payments. Roll on 5 years and one dog has a heart condition. We’ve paid out several hundred for scans and checks and now paying £100 each month in meds. And that is fine as 1/we have the account we have saved in, 2/ we’re fortunate to have the means to cover what may come next.

and with no other claims in the last 5 years we’re definitely still better off than if we’d paid premiums in that time.

I would always have insurance if I could potentially not cover necessary treatment, be it accident or illness.

Our cat is 18 years old. I don’t know what that is in human years, I guess quite elderly. We’ve decided that insured or not, we won’t put her through any treatment for anything else now as she’s just too frail and distressed. She has daily metacam for her arthritis and the regular blood test for these are traumatic enough. Also we’ve never claimed for these as the excess is so high.
Her insurance renewal this year was £169 per month. Ridiculous. I’ve have now cancelled it.

That seems crazy! She doesn't seem elderly, still as spritley as she ever was.

My childhood cat was 15 when she had to be pts, you could tell she was getting on, she was thinner, quieter and her fur wasn't as shiny or soft so I would say she was elderly.

Most pet insurance says cats are senior from 8, and elderly from 11.

A cat aged 13 is around 68-70 in human years so definitely older, bless her! However, from the age of around 8 they’re classed as mature to then go onto seniors. That being said I see plenty of cats everyday well into their late teens/early twenties and some of them refuse to slow down whatsoever☺️

My first cat was three months short of 19 when she had to be PTS because of cancer and I'd had her from five weeks.

My second cat was PTS on Tuesday and she was 11-12. A rescue so no real age. Rescue said 1-3 and my vet said 6 months, which we went with. We had hours knowing she wasn't very well. But minutes that we had to let her go.

Neither cat seemed old.

I cat-sit regularly and one of my regulars made it to twenty - he could jump up on the oven until the day he died, bless him!

I'm convinced she will outlive me and I'm not even 40 yet! She's the kind of cat I could drive 100 miles away, leave in the middle of nowhere and then find her sitting on the doorstep as I arrived home.

She was run over a few years ago and broke several ribs, badly hurt her leg and punctured a lung. The vet said she would need rest and quiet..she didn't get the memo. Within minutes of being home she was launching herself onto the tops of wardrobes and jumping around like a mad thing. Had to put her in a massive dog crate whilst she recovered for her own safety!

That was when the insurance came in handy though, she must have only been about 5 and has made a full recovery. I would make the same decision now if it happened again because she seems robust enough to make a full recovery but maybe in a year or two it would be very different in which case insurance wouldn't necessarily be worth it.

I cancelled my dogs insurance when it went to £145 pcm the year before it was £118. I worked out that between the premium and excess she would need £2800 treatment a year to break even. Since I have cancelled she has had some hydrogen freezing sessions, tests for Cushing disease and now medication for Cushing, heart disease and arthritis which is approx £90 a month as I ask for a written prescription from the vet and purchase online.

We had our lovely cat pts earlier this year - she was ten. We’d had her back and forth for bouts of vomiting over the previous nine months which the vet was never concerned about (and we never claimed for) until I pushed for investigations when it became more frequent. £2k of tests later and it transpired she had intestinal lymphoma. Chemo and steroids could have extended her life but as the prognosis was very poor we opted to let her go while she was still “well”.

Without insurance we wouldn’t have been eventually referred to the specialist surgery where she was diagnosed after CT and MRI scans, and would probably still be bumbling along. The cost of treatment would have been covered by insurance if we had gone down that route. Unlike pps we weren’t covered for cremation/euthanasia/casket but other than the excess everything else was paid for.

We now have a little ginger hooligan who we adopted from CPL. he came with a month’s insurance and I had a new policy in place beginning two days before the free one ended. No chances taken!

One of the real benefits of the insurance for me - as a naturally anxious person! - has been that the policy has given us access to 24h phone/video call support with a vet nurse.

We've been debating this recently, our dog is coming up 7, we currently pay about £40pm on insurance. We've had a couple of payouts over the years, for one off incidents (she has no health issues currently)

We are tempted to stop paying, we can afford to cover vets costs if they happened, but it almost seems like we're asking for trouble stopping paying!

@Judystilldreamsofhorses sorry to hear about your girl. ISTR my vet saying lymphoma is the most common cancer in cats. One of my cats died of lymphoma, he was 12. He wasn't insured by that age but his treatment wasn't expensive, he had a diagnostic ultrasound then daily steroid tablets, but he only lived a few weeks longer (PTS).

My three youngest cats are insured with Agria who now offer access to 24/7 vet video calls. I've never had to use it but nice to know it's there.

I’ve never had pet insurance in over fifty years of keeping, showing & breeding dogs, apart from new puppy insurance from the Kennel Club to cover a couple of months as they’re moving from me to their new owners, then it’s up to their new owners if they carry on with insurance from somewhere or not.
what I’ve always done is put money aside in a seperate account that’s only used for vet bills & other expenses they incur. I pay any vet bills out of that. I always buy medication from the online pet pharmacies after buying the prescription from the vet if it’s for anything more than a one off small charge. One of my recent 16 year olds was on four seperate medications for three years. I bought a six month prescription for each medication £20 each from the vet, they were heart pills and arthritis .The cost from the vet was £485 a month for the pills, the one & only time I bought them direct.
Subsequently the cost for six months bought in a one off delivery, note SIX MONTHS worth, of exactly the same pills in EXACTLY THE SAME PACKAGING as from the vets was £146 plus the prescription charge to the vet.
Incidentally the account for them after years of deposits & withdrawals now stands in excess of £40 thousand, an amount that would have been in some insurance company’s profit balance.
Just saying.

Mine was cancelled when the renewal came up as £100pm, and my dog was not even 9 at that point. She had been insured from 4 months, and we claimed less than £2000 in that time (a broken bone, and a bite from another dog).
Since then, I have had to pay £700 for a dental (which was not covered by insurance anyway, and she has had a few scares which thankfully meds sorted.
At nearly 14, and a large breed, I would not be pulling any heroics anyway.

Yes, ours said the same - I had no idea but since now know three people in real life whose cats have had it. I think we were unusual in that her only symptom was the puking, she never stopped eating or lost weight, and right to her last day was racing about like a mad thing. I do wonder if we let her go too soon, but I couldn’t have coped with her deteriorating or suffering in any way - while it was the absolute worst thing for us I hope it was the right one for her.

Gosh I’d not even thought about this. My girl is 15 this year and has cataracts and is deaf. She’s started to lose it a bit and gone slightly senile - barks when we are not in the house (only started this about a year ago) and soils in the house as well as waking us up at 4am every morning without fail. But otherwise seems healthy?

Im sure we’re only paying about £15 a month for her, never claimed.