I love my cats but I won't waste my money insuring them

The words in the title are from Katie Morley, consumer champion at The Telegraph newspaper. She comments on the money section. Her title is one that I sympathise with. I have written about this before (see link below) and I will briefly touch on it again here.

What she is saying is that rather than take out a pet insurance policy, she would rather pay out of her savings. It requires self-discipline but if you can open a savings account labelled "pet health insurance" and routinely put say £200 into the account once a month you can build up enough money to pay your veterinary fees without the need to pay an insurance company an administration fee which pushes up the insurance premiums.

Don't take out an insurance policy. Run your own savings account instead and be disciplined about it.

The best form of pet health insurance is self-insurance. Your own system. It just requires self-discipline.

Within your own home insurance system you avoid all the weasel words so common in insurance policies. I've written about that too but got to be very careful with insurance policies of any type.

CLICK THIS LINK TO READ ARTICLES ABOUT PET HEALTH  INSURANCE.

Insurance is a way to 'print money' in effect. The big insurance companies are leaning heavily on people's anxieties. Having an insurance policy for your pet or your home makes you feel better. It is reassuring. But it is expensive.

Insurance companies can guarantee to make money unlike almost all other businesses because all they have to do is put up the insurance premiums if they start seeing that their profit margins are falling. And their customers sign up to that. They can't complain.

All you can do is change the insurance provider at the end of the year which I do all the time for my car. Every year I change the insurer because they entice new customers with lower insurance premiums and after the first year they put them up dramatically because they feed on loyalty. The same kind of thing happens with any insurance company in any field of insurance.

So the best thing is to work out your own insurance policy and start as soon as possible so that by the time your cat requires a veterinarian you have got perhaps a couple of thousand pounds in the savings account to cover the cost.

There are a link above on this page which leads to many articles containing a lot more detail on this topic than I have covered here. Please use them as I think you will find them useful.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.