Pet insurance recommendations

I've been with Petplan, they too have been brilliant.

A huge plus is I've yet to find a place that wont take direct payment from them.

What I didn't like though was when my Alaskan Malamute/retriever cross reached aged 10

On Petplans top covered for life policy, on reaching 9 we were paying the following.

£68.73 a month, this included £12,000 a year vet bills.

On top of this we had to pay an additional £135 excess for every new condition/claim

The excess seemed to go up every year (as did the monthly payments) but we were happy to pay this as he was covered for life.

However, at the bottom of my 2018 - 2019 Petplan document it said the following

In 12 months time, as XXX is getting older we want to give you advanced notice of a change that will apply from your next policy renewal in February 2019. in ADDITION to the fixed amount you pay, you will also pay a percentage of all claims submitted for veterinary treatment. Typically this percentage is 20%.

The reason I went with Petplan in the first place was so that I would never have to worry about vet bills.

I didn't renew this February, and my dog now has no insurance.

The reasoning for this was simple.

A) As he's such a big dog, he's counted as old.

b) I wouldn't put an old dog through a huge operation, while I love him to bits, I would put his quality of life before my wish of him to always be here.

c) paying £800 a year plus £135 of any claim, plus an additional 20% is just stupid. If he needed a 2.5k op, that would cost me in addition to my monthly payment, £635. There's no way on this planet I would have those funds, it was a real struggle to keep up with his monthly payments as it was.

d) putting the monthly payments into a savings account instead, if he did need a visit to the vets and some meds (which he hasn't for years), it's not going to cost £935 + 20% of the bill.

Maybe this was mentioned somewhere in the policy booklet when I first took it out, but it came as a real shock to me, I presumed covered for life meant just that, I would never need to worry about paying anything except my excess.

My cat had the 20% copay and £115 excess.

When that came into force I was able to build up savings.

Without the insurance she wouldn't have been able to see a regional (if not national) Specialist Vet, things got to a point where all my local Vet could offer was a medication trial.

She was diagnosed with small cell lymphoma, with that diagnosis I could concentrate on making her last week (as it turned out) the best it could be and when the end came it was expected, I'd made all the decisions about how I'd like things to go.

They paid out around £2700 in the end which is way more than 4 years of premiums with Pet Plan. More than I'd paid all the other insurers over the last 13 years too!

That figure was 95% made up of diagnostics, it's not like I put her through expensive treatment for the sake of it, all the tests under specialist input were needed to diagnose.