Bringing home a pet can be one of the most enjoyable times for any family but the potential costs of caring for your new family member are often ignored. There are the initial costs of the food, toys, and accessories for our beloved pets, to begin with, and then of course there is the cost of actually buying the pet, whether that be a shelter fee or the cost of a purebred animal. Once you have your new pet, they will require veterinary checkups, examinations, and vaccinations to keep them healthy and active.
You may think that this is the end of the expenses for the most part, except for the occasional injury or illness, but those occasional vet bills can really begin to add up, and from the costs of food and toys to the costs of health care, the expenses of a pet can climb surprisingly high over that pet's lifetime. The fact is that the cost of owning a dog is approximately 9,000 in the UK, and the corresponding figure for a feline is just a bit over 7,200.
These numbers might seem staggering to someone who is considering bringing home a family pet for the first time, and indeed, pet costs can be much higher than we anticipate. There is nothing we can really do to offset many of those costs, including things like food, shelter, and toys, all pretty much like children need. Another need that children and our animal friends have in common is medical care, and this is something that we can do something about financially.
Many people consider medical care for our pets to be unnecessary and even wasteful, but if you consider the annual cost of pet ownership when faced with mounting vet bills, it's very wise to look into ways to prepare for those costs. Like medical insurance for people, pet insurance helps to protect us from high bills when the dog swallows rat poison or the cat burns itself on the stove. You may pay an entire year of premiums and not use your plan once, but cancelling it could mean paying a single veterinary bill that equals the expense of several years of cover.
Especially for chronic conditions, which many pets develop in some form or other over their lifetimes, medical care can be hugely expensive runing into many thousands. With pet insurance, you are able to defer many of these costs such as regular medications and still treat your pet with the love and care it deserves.
No one wants to be forced into a position where they have to make an emotional decision based on their financial budget. When you are faced with your monthly premiums versus a one time cost that could break the bank, which would you choose? And yet without pet insurance, you lose that chance to choose, possibly dooming your pet because you cannot afford the costs of emergency care or of a costly procedure that might otherwise be covered by a simple pet insurance plan.
