As most of you know by now, Chanel is our cat about town. With traveling and her tendency to attempt to defy gravity, it was time to get serious and consider pet insurance.

Getting Started Choosing Pet Insurance

My friend Lisa Richman wrote an article last year on her blog A Tonk’s Tail examining whether pet insurance is worth the cost. After doing some research on her part, she determined that is certainly seems to be worth the investment. I’ve had several friends have to use it, including Julie who writes here and owns Cupcake.

Now, I dare you to put “pet insurance” into your favorite search engine. You will drown in the number of hits that come up. However, I did it (you are welcome) and did manage to find the site consumersadvocate.org that had some interesting reviews. I then also found reviews.com and went through their reviews as well.

Getting My Pet Insurance Quotes

While some insurers have a “wellness package” that you can purchase in addition to their illness and accident insurance, I did the math and I would be just as far ahead by putting those funds into savings. Since I have an automatic deduction each month into a savings account (though not specifically for pet stuff), I decided to forgo the wellness and just review illness and accident insurance.

I decided to get reviews from four different companies based on information from both of those sites. Since Ivy is getting up there in age, I decided to price it out for all 3 of the girls in my house. Ivy is currently 9 years old, Daiquiri is 3 years old and Chanel is 1 year old. For the case of full disclosure, there is a fourth cat that lives with me. However, Junior is what I would call semi-feral and I am leaving him out of this experiment. (It’s a long story.)

I tried to keep all the information as to deductibles and payout limits with a range but some websites wouldn’t allow me to keep all the numbers the same. Here is what I got:

Figo	Healthy Paws	Trupanion	Embrace
$500 deductible 80% coverage $14k annual benefit	$250 deductible 80% coverage unlimited coverage lifetime benefit	90% coverage $500 deductible lifetime benefit	90% coverage $500 deductible $15k annual coverage lifetime coverage
Chanel $17.46	Chanel  $18.19	Chanel  $22.56	Chanel  $17.80
Daiquiri $23.02	Daiquiri  $21.38	Daiquiri  $31.31	Daiquiri  $18.32
Ivy $15.51	Ivy  $23.08	Ivy  $48.73	Ivy  $28.60
Total per month: $62.65	Total per month: $62.65	Total per month: $102.60	Total per month: $64.72

Of course, when you put in your information, you have to give them an email address. For the sake of being annoying with the follow up emails, I put in the quote on 6/19/18 and have gotten 7 emails from Embrace, 4 from Trupanion and 2 each from Figo and Healthy Paws.

Making a Pet Insurance Decision

Since the coverage was all about the same, it was interesting to look at price. Ivy was a weird outlier with Trupanion. Since she doesn’t go out except to go to the vet and her last checkup was good, they were out of the running pretty much from the start. I didn’t know enough about Healthy Paws and really had never heard of them before, so I crossed them out as well. That left Embrace and Figo.

I will admit, the number of follow up emails in a week wasn’t going to win Embrace any prizes.

Figo also has an interesting online app that the other companies do not. From their “pet cloud” you can access vet records and also file a claim right from your phone. They don’t require a vet visit to enroll, but will look at records from the 12 previous months for pre-existing conditions. No restrictions on the vet you use either.

After a lot of looking around and making up my mind, I have decided to give Figo a run. Hopefully we won’t have a claim, but I promise to keep you posted.