When should you consider pet insurance?
I wanted to touch on a topic that I briefly mentioned in my post about pet insurance vs. personal savings or a credit card:
Accidents to pets of all ages can happen at any time.
I recently received an email from a pet owner who was hitting herself in the forehead (actually, the forehead of her husband) for not getting pet insurance sooner. The day after she got the insurance (and still under waiting periods, unfortunately) her 4 month old lab, CoCo, fell into a hole a broke her leg! Of course she had been telling her husband about pet insurance for months, but didn’t happen to get it until right when something bad happened! (Isn’t that how it always works?) So, $1500 later she tells me she was telling her husband off for not listening the first time around. Now husbands, let this be a lesson: us women are always right 
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Kidding aside, she (even if unknowingly) holds a good point. Accidents can happen any time! And even expensive ones! If she had gotten the insurance a month ago (or even 6 days prior) the broken leg would have been covered.
This brings me to my next point. At what age should you consider pet insurance? Of course I would argue the younger the better, and this pet owner (and CoCo) are proof of that. Not to mention, and I’ll go back to CoCo’s story, anything related to this leg break would now be pre-existing, which as many of you would know (or could read about in my post about pre-existing conditions and pet insurance) are not covered under the majority of pet insurance policies. Statistically, it’s possible that most health conditions won’t occur until later in a pet’s life, but then aren’t you playing roulette? If you keep waiting and something happens tomorrow, it’s already too late because that condition or incident wouldn’t be covered and it would become pre-existing.
But, what do you think?
I think the younger the better, especially if you want everything to be covered.
I learned my lesson. I had a dog with cancer…no insurance. After she left for the bridge, I got another dog…this time considered insurance…but it wasn’t until after she got a couple of UTIs that I got her insured. I wonder what the percentages are that pet owners check into insurance AFTER something happens. I bet the majority do. As with the dog with cancer, I checked into insurance after the fact.
I also wonder…is it easier for an insurance company to call something hereditary when you are dealing with a puppy? Just a thought….