Should we cancel our pet insurance.?

[Southlondoner88]

Looking for advice please, we have two rescue dogs, one we’ve had four years and she is about 6 or 7 and the other we really are not sure but say about 4 or 5, we have him two years.

The younger one has an old injury that we think he got from being hit by a car (before we got him). The vet thinks it healed by itself and he just gets in with it, he never shows pain but doesn’t like long walks, he runs and plays well and you’d have to really pull his leg for him to show any sign of pain. He’s been on gabapentin since we got him, we buy from the vet and it cost £40 per month, we claim this back with insurance every month so it’s really ‘free.’ Our other dog appears healthy, never had issues apart from colitis in the past.

Lifetime Insurance for both dogs costs nearly £90 pm, we use two different insurers because it was cheaper that way.

We’re about to buy a house and also TTC so I’m really considering cancelling the insurance as money is tight and will be even tighter as time goes on.

In all fairness is insurance even worth it? The younger dog with the injury can’t really be treated for anything. The vet told us if he gets arthritis (which is likely) his size will effect how he can be treated long term, he’s 37kg. If he ends up needing a leg amputated, he will probably be better off being put to sleep, that’s what the vet said (he did say it more politely).

They also both have bad anxiety and hate the vet to the point they won’t even go through the door of the vet, the vet comes outside the door to them so if they had something seriously wrong with them, what could the vet even do? It would be traumatising for them to have long term treatment and I’d worry they’d become aggressive.

The reason we took insurance out on them in the first place was because it seems to be the done thing in the UK, I’d never heard about it before in Ireland where I’m from and many of my relatives think we’re mad for paying for it. Also our dogs stay on leads so it limits their exposure to things that harm then (cars, scavenging).

Would you cancel insurance? I’m worried that if something happened then we’d need to use our credit cards or savings which wouldn’t be ideal or we’d have to put them down because we wouldn’t have money for treatment.

Sorry OP but it won’t cover baby expenses. We spend around £150 a month extra on food, nappies, clothes, other essentials etc, £100 or so on activities, £700 a month for 3 days childcare.

I can't work out if this is a joke or not... have you actually done the sums on how much babies cost? £90pm will barely dent it.

Sorry to hear you can't afford to have children right now, and will need to wait until you're financially secure enough.

We've never had insurance for our cats as they are semi-feral house cats. We can't get them to the vet for vaccinations which means we cannot get insurance.

We lost one a year ago and it cost us about £1,000 for his end of life treatment over 3 days. We could afford that thankfully.

Now just got the one and she's never needed the vet in the 12 years we've had her.

Just as an FYI you can still insure them even if they're not vaccinated :)

All it means is that your insurance won't pay out for any conditions that could have been prevented if you had vaccinated, iyswim.

@HiHoHiHoltsOffToWorkWeGo obviously it was sarcasm 🙄

I didn’t say we can’t afford to have a baby (thanks to all concerned) just that money is tight due to mortgage, inflation, moving costs etc and general cost of living so have been looking carefully at our budget hence this thread to see if it’s worth cutting costs. Seems like it may not be but some do it and end up ok, others don’t.

anyway thank you for the helpful replies, we will stick with it for now but we are contemplating just saving it instead.

🤣 £90 a week wouldn't even cover childcare.... Let alone for food, clothes, childcare etc for a month.

We were paying £85/month for our 10 year old lab. It stared at £28/month and increased with his age. I reckon we paid out £7-8k in insurance in those 10 years. There was a £4k/year policy limit.

We claimed at least £12k in 3 major claims for unrelated conditions (£8k was in the last 2.5 years), and probably another £2k for various smaller claims. So it was well worth the premiums.

Vet costs have rocketed in the last couple of years, when ours was ill the last couple of months every visit we went to the vets it was £100s of pounds, the hospital each set of tests, not even treatment was over £1k.

It is obviously a choice whether to have insurance for pets or not, but if you choose not to you might find your only choice will be PTS for financal reasons. I am not saying there is anything wrong with that if you give a pet a good life and it means they are out of pain.

My dog has run up £10k in bills in 18 months, could you afford that?

this. When my cat was ill the first op £1,500 was paid by insurance.

A few months later I decided against putting her through further treatment; I would have felt guilty forever if I thought this decision was based on cost.

ive Insured my last six dogs. I currently have a 5 year old spaniel - she was diagnosed with hypothyroidism two years ago. She has daily meds and bloods/exams every 3 months. Meds £20 per month. Bloods etc £200.

The lab is two years old. so far other than eating medication I accidentally knocked out of a cupboard I’ve had no need to claim. The eating meds was overnight in the emergency vet , various tests etc about £400

Several years ago, my previously fit, healthy dogs aged 6 and 10 needed mri/X-ray/surgeries. £15,000 over six months.

I’m fortunate, I can afford the premiums, I’m a cheap date, my dogs are my biggest expense. Insurance was such a relief during the awful period when my two previous dogs became suddenly seriously ill.

All these stories of how insured owners have come out on top financially are making me a) jealous and b) wonder how insurers make any money.

There is no way I'd ever own a pet without insurance I pay £70 per month and claim £200 a month in vet bills and have done for years.it's paid out for everything from broken teeth ,urine infection,abscess
I simply couldn't do without it

I haven't come out on top yet.

But... by luck I have a robustly healthy dog who makes poor decisions and yet somehow seems to avoid needing vet treatment.

What I do pay for is peace of mind - much the same as for any other insurance that isn't legally required.

I've got 2 dogs that I've claimed for once (about £160) and another that so far has cost the insurers £1400. That one is 15 months old.

🤣🤣🤣

I can't believe how many people aren't getting the sarcasm here

If you’re considering cancelling because money is tight, you need to keep it. Even a simple illness/injury can pick up thousands.

That being said; I have 3 horses that I don’t insure. For a decent equine insurance cover, it’s £50-£100 each a month and that will only cover me up to 3.5k vet bills and I still have to pay 17% on top. I have them insured for third party liability but I save the cost of the premiums instead. I also have substantial savings should there be a disaster and I’m also confident in my ability to obtain and repay credit if need me.

I think the problem is that terminal conditions are not always obvious. It may take a few days as an inpatient to work out what is going on. We lost both a cat and a rabbit from conditions that appeared suddenly and were deemed to be potentially treatable at first and not terminal.

However for both, a few days into the treatment, after terminal diagnosis, the only viable option was to PTS. This was after spending £6k ish per animal. The cat was insured but just over the age limit so we covered 50% and the rabbit wasn’t (as the insurer had cancelled it).

Unless you take the view that any health condition will spiral and PTS at the first consultation, you will likely end up paying £thousands to give your animal a chance.

The people I know who self insure either have substantial savings and/or save the monthly premium in a savings account. If you're needing to spend the premium elsewhere I'd say you can't afford not to be insured.

At the end of the day, pet insurance is mostly a gamble. Most people are lucky enough never to need to claim for large bills, but they pay for insurance just in case.

If you're lucky enough to never have needed to put in a large claim I can see why you'd think it was a bit of a rip-off, but it only takes one incident for your pet run up thousands of pounds in bills.

I’ve just insured my new young whippet.
Previously I had 2 older whippets (adopted at 5, died at 13 and 14). I didn’t insure them and it worked out fine as they were healthy, didn’t have a serious injury and didn’t cause an accident.

Researching it again for the new dog I now realise I should have had public liability with the Dogs Trust at least. 🤦‍♀️

I also didn’t realise you could choose to insure against injury or injury and illness so again I might have just gone for injury.

I was pretty confident that we could afford as much medical treatment as we would be prepared to put a very sensitive rescue whippet through. The vet would say, Are you insured?” , and then I’d say that we weren’t but I was happy to pay for whatever she was suggesting.

In total, they had one scan for an episode of bilirubin in urine which vet clearly thought was a nasty pancreatic issue but I thought was too much protein in a new food (it was thank goodness), a dental, some heart meds, some anti inflammatories and some painkillers, one pts, none of which seemed OTT cost wise.

So I was lucky with those two but now having lost them and still being heartbroken I have insured new dog. Partly out of grief I think if that makes sense?

Sorry that’s a ramble. I think I’m trying to say that you can’t know until afterwards whether your decision pays off or not. It’s a gamble. Good luck whatever you decide.

We cancelled ours when it became £££ per month at age 10 and then stopped covering anything that would be deemed due to age. However we went in to this in the fortunate position of knowing we could pay if anything came up, and it did. He had lymphoma and we chose to go for chemo and must have spent upwards of £7k to get him some extra time. If money will be tight - keep the insurance. I can't imagine PTS because I hadn't insured or couldn't pay for treatment.

I wouldn't cancel it for the dog where you're currently getting £40 per month medication for £45 per month premium (if I've understood your post correctly).

It's all a gamble, but statistically, you are unlikely to make back the premiums paid over a dog's lifetime - that has to be the case, otherwise insurance companies would not be able to pay staff, run the schemes and make a profit!

The cost of diagnosing an illness alone makes me sweat .