A Buyer's Guide To Pet Insurance Cover

A Buyer's Guide To Pet Insurance Cover

Pet health insurance can be very valuable when your pet gets sick or is injured in an accident, as it will allow you to pay the often hugely costly fees that veterinaries charge to make your pet healthy again. Without the safety net that a good pet insurance policy can supply, you may be confronted with the unhappy decision of euthanizing your pet rather than letting it keep on living in misery.

With this in mind, increasing numbers of people are determining that this relatively young flavour of insurance is a prudent buy. But how can you make up your mind which of the many different policies available is a good choice for you? Here are three things that you should certainly think about.

Firstly, is the policy appropriate for your animal? Most policies have specified exclusions that could make them entirely unsuitable for your circumstances. For example, particular breeds of bird that are prone to expensive conditions might be excluded from cover. Another example is that most policies have a cap on the age of the pet to be covered. If you don't closely go over the cover documents for these exclusions, you may well find out that any claim you have to make in the future is turned down.

Next, determine how much you can afford to pay for your insurance policy. Plainly, in most cases, the less you pay the less features you will enjoy. The flipside of this is that if you pay more you might end up being charged for benefits you are unlikely to need or ever claim for. Even so, insurance costs can vary widely even for products offering broadly similar set of benefits, so it's worthwhile shopping around and using price comparison services to get the sweetest deal. Always remember though that product comparison sites don't ordinarily compare offers from every insurance company on the market, so it can often be a worthwhile task to do a little research of your own as well.

Finally, look around on the net for critiques written by other customers. This will help you decide on whether the policy is worth taking out. There are two points to keep in mind here though. Disgruntled people are more likely to post reviews than customers who are happy, so you could get unrepresentative picture by only reading reports written by unhappy customers. Secondly, positive reviews can sometimes have a surreptitious motive: they could have been posted by the company themselves, for example, or they could even have been published by a salesman with the purpose of pulling in a profit by convincing you to buy. Nonetheless, you can get an overall idea of the value of a product by reading a wide range of reviews across multiple sites.