Help with insurance please?

[bahhamburgers]

Hi, can someone give me some advice on pet insurance for a dog please.

This came back best value and with the highest amount of cover and the least excess.

Golden retriever puppy. We currently have 5 weeks insurance from the breeder.

Depends where you are, but £3k wouldn't get me far with any serious issues where I live - I would want a much higher limit.

Also, do make sure that you start the new policy at least 14 days (or whatever the policy you look at specifies) before the current one expires. A new policy will not kick-in for a lot of things within the first 14 days, so you need that overlap.

£3K is really nothing, OP…

My spaniel just had an eye operation and it cost me £7K.

Goldens are prone to dysplasia and cancer - that can cost thousands.

I would strongly recommend at least £10K in cover. It really is better to be safe than sorry.

To be brutally honest OP that looks to be the absolute bare minimum cover, nowhere near enough if God forbid things go wrong.

Look elsewhere.

Also looking at these two, figured the unlimited would be better?

These two also include 3rd party, everything else is the same.

Okay, will continue to look!

I would also say, check the reviews of the company before you commit- I just googled the company name so ‘perfect pet insurance reviews’ and the reviews are primarily 1*…

Better to stick with well known companies IME

Neither of these either OP really. You have a dog that is prone to dysplasia, those surgeries can be around £8k PER hip/leg.

We have a Labrador and have the max cover for him for the same reason, they are expensive!

You need max cover- ideally £10k+, and you want to make sure that it is a lifetime policy.

Unless you have 15k ish sitting in a bank account somewhere then you also want to make sure that you pick an insurer whom your vets are happy to take payment direct from- as far as I know the main one for that is Pet Plan. Otherwise if your dog needs say £3k surgery, you would have to find the £3000 to pay yourself and then you claim it back from the insurance, if you don’t have the money to pay though your insurance is pointless. So you really want to make sure you choose an insurance company who will pay direct to vets and who your vets are happy to take direct payment from so that all you ever have to pay is the excess.

It’s such a gamble, isn’t it?

I had two golden retrievers, both lived until the age of 15 and I didn’t ever have to use the insurance, bar for one of them in her last year when she developed arthritis and needed an oral suspension.

I will say though that as I’ve got older this has scared me more. I know that a lot of shit happens in life with money etc, circumstances changing I learned the hard way.

I only got another dog as I had an inheritance. I have put aside a significant sun of that, that I can afford not to touch. We wouldn’t have got a new puppy otherwise.

It’s just never a chance worth taking really.

We had 1 dog who literally never needed the vets for anything at all, not a single claim on their insurance their whole lives. We then had another dog who age 6 was diagnosed with diabetes, diabetic cataracts meant she was blind the surgery to remove them was £4500, she required insulin injected twice daily (so monthly payments for sharps boxes, needles, the actual insulin), developed further health issues as a result, she cost an absolute fortune.

We have a Labrador now and as I say we have the max cover, touch wood we’ve never had to use it yet & he’s almost 3 but I would always always rather have the best insurance and never need to use it, than to have the cheapest insurance and end up unable to pursue treatment if it came to it. Unless of course you have £15000 in a bank account not being used that you could use in place of insurance.

We've just swapped from ManyPets to M&S for our young Labrador. The MP premium got a bit much even though we hadn't claimed in the two years. We've dropped from £15k cover to £10k which brought the premium to a reasonable price. From past experience M&S will pay the vet direct.

I’d definitely go for 9k or more cover . Our dog has a lifetime policy with Direct line and although they can be a bit slow to pay they always have with no issue . Our Siamese are with Petplan and they pay you back really quickly . I wouldn’t go with anybody who wanted the excess + a percentage .

It’s entirely up to the vet whether they will accept direct payment . Our vet doesn’t except for very longstanding customers with pet plan insurance .

It's also worth checking how the excess is applied. It's not the same for all companies.

Many (most?) insurers require the excess to be paid once per condition. With others, e.g. ManyPets you only pay the excess once per policy year.

We always go with PetPlan. They have never failed to pay out. Our big dog (GSD x Golden Retriever) costs us £90 per month, but I claim back about £250 per month and they pay every month, without putting up the premium.

Our Lab puppy is £72 per month for £12000 cover, but I know that the premium will never go up because I claim, only because of inflation. I'm happy to do that because I never want to say to DD2 (whose dog she is) that we need to put her down because we can't afford to treat her. We couldn't afford a bill of £12000, so I'd rather pay the insurance fee.

With PetPlan, the vet will also take direct claims over £600. So if they needed a big op, I don't have to find the money. Our big dog needed his ears cleaned under GA a few months ago - £700.

PetPlan are great, but expensive. To insure our two Rotties this past year at ages 10 and 8 was costing around £450/month. That said, over their lifetimes we've claimed many times in excess of what we've paid and they've never quibbled over any of the claims.

My lab is under two years old. Thus week alone has cost us six hundred pounds in vet fees.

one friends eight year old dog cost her eight thousand pounds. Another friend had a young cat that cost four thousand pounds. Others never claim.

I wouldn’t go with purely pets, my last dog was insured with them, they got really bad for trying to not pay claims - refusing them for things like the form being dated the day the vet saw him and signed it, insisting it had to be dated after treatment was finished... for painkillers for elbow dysplasia and put up the premiums massively for claiming, which for instance petplan don’t do, so while they started off being about £10 a month cheaper by the time he was 5 they wanted £250 a month.

Do they insure pets with pre-existing conditions?

MP do. You have to go two years without any treatment or veterinary advice for it, then the pre-existing condition drops out of consideration. M&S doesn't.

A MONTH!!!!!?????

Hello.