When is best to sort pet insurance out?

[AGoodCupOfTea]

Getting a Sphynx kitten soon. Not sure what date exactly but somewhere after the 11th Nov if all goes well with his neutering.

I have been thinking about setting up pet insurance now so that when he’s finally here the insurance will be good to go. As I understand it, there’s a 14 day period where there’s no cover or limited cover anyway.

So I was thinking of avoiding this by starting the plan early? Can I do that? I haven’t actually got the kitten yet...

I’m thinking of going with PetPlan if it makes any difference.

Anyone?

If you know who you want to go with why not give them a call - we went with Petplan and found them really helpful (we adopted them from CPL and had a little period of free insurance and, like you, I wanted to get them sorted asap).

The only snag might be that they wanted specific dates of birth and dates they came home which might be tricky if you haven't got these yet?

Once we got the insurance it was done as soon as the temporary cover expired (that was with Petplan and they actually phoned us before expiry to check they had new insurance arranged).

Hope this waffling makes sense!

Ah see I don’t want to wait till the temporary insurance expires as it doesn’t actually cover you for very much so I wanted to start my own annual policy straight away. It sounds like I can’t do that though... which means he isn’t really covered properly for 4 weeks...

I think I’ll have to call them like you say.

You'll need a vet check first. An insurance company is unlikely to insure an animal that hasn't been checked and declared free of illness/disease. If you're buying from a breeder it should come insured anyway, usually for 4 weeks initially.

Ok so I can’t actually insure the kitten until it’s vet checked? How come none of the insurance sites ask this when doing a quote?

Scrabble I rang petplan and they say I don’t need to have him vet checked before taking out a policy.

However I can’t arrange a policy to coincide with the 4 weeks free which turns out that it’s technically only 2 weeks of cover as the first 2 weeks only covers for accidents just as I thought. The remaining two weeks covers illness and accident.

I can’t start my annual policy until that expires.

Thanks for everyone’s help.

Start it from the day the free one expires.