Insurance for older cats?

[MotherCupboard]

My cat has just turned 10 and therefore her insurance renewal has gone through the roof and now as well as the excess apparently I have to pay 20% of the vet fees as well. All for the princely sum of over £25 a month with petplan so I'll be shopping around. But I was wondering if you have an older cat who is your insurance with and how much do you pay a month? Also what level of cover would I need? Touch wood, my cat has been in great health all her life and I've been paying for lifetime cover for the last ten years which I've never used and that seems like a waste of money now so I want to make sure that I'm only paying for cover that I actually need. But pet insurance confuses me!

Definitely stick with lifetime cover as a 12 month policy means that when you renew next year, any previous conditions will be excluded.

Will be interested to see what other people recommend as we are with Petplan too and think the 20% is a bit cheeky. Also not an insignificant sum when you enter the realms of specialst treatment running into the thousands.

A lot of insurance companies won't let you take out an insurance policy for an older pet - the cut off is often 8 yrs for dogs (5 for giant breeds) and 10 for cats, so make sure you can actually find new cover elsewhere before cancelling. You are much more likely to claim for chronic illnesses with an ageing pet, so premiums will be higher and a 12 month policy less useful.

I've done a couple of quotes and have put that she is over 10 and it looks like a few providers will give me a few grand worth of cover for a year for lifetime cover but I don't know whether say £2000-£4,000 per year is going to be enough. I can't afford to continue current policy at £25 a month and I certainly couldn't afford to pay 20% of anything on top as well. I was hoping to get it down this renewal but I didn't realise that 10 was a magic number for cat insurance.

Honestly it’s so difficult trying to renew insurance on an older cat that by the time they are 11/12 etc you are stuck with the company. We’ve found usual annual vet costs for our two elderly gents never gets over the £200 excess and 20% of the rest so we never claim on insurance, but we agree it’s best to keep it just in case.

Oh and it doesn’t cover out of hours costs except life threatening conditions. One cat had a long out of the blue seizure and the emergency vet cost £150 just for the appointment. We are with Tesco pet insurance, but the terms seem to be industry standard.

I would at least be looking for the £4K mark of cover although sometimes £7k isn’t much more monthly. People often think of insurance for emergencies like a broken leg but actually conditions like heart or kidney disease can be costly and long term.

Avoid places like ‘animal friends’.

Just check the small print. Some have sneaky definitions of lifetime cover and won't actually cover something the following year. I agreed to make sure you are happy with what you have in place before you cancel as you are unlikely to be able to go back to lifetime cover with petplan once you cancel

I wouldn't try to change in later years, but we did have a good policy with Direct Line. I don't know exactly what cover we had but they paid out a lot and at the end only deducted a small amount for some tests that went over their limit, just a few £. I would use them again.

Most rescues use PetPlan and give a months cover when you adopt which I think is why people use them, I have seen many threads where people have mentioned how expensive it becomes.