Why we should all start paying attention to insurance for ourselves as much as our pets: Sarah Coles

I should admit up front that I have a dog. She’s 11 and is a friendly, furry financial liability. There were some things we decided were non-negotiable from the start, including insurance. This is essentially private medical cover for your dog, with some add-ons.

What I didn’t fully appreciate back then was that the cost of insurance gradually creeps up as your pet gets older and I’m now paying over £100 a month. If you have a lifetime policy, it tends to be more expensive, but you’re largely paying for the same cover you did on day one (unless you’ve used up any lifetime limits). If you have an annual policy, you’ll generally pay less, but if they’ve developed a condition during the year, it will usually be excluded from then on. We opted for a lifetime policy, because we have a dog with no sense of what officially qualifies as edible.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that you can’t compare the need for pet insurance with the option of buying private medical insurance for humans, because the NHS means we can get emergency treatment without charge. However, if your pet needs a non-urgent operation, physiotherapy or behavioural therapy, they can get it almost immediately, whereas the waits for humans can be unbearable. For some people, whether or not to buy PMI is a matter of political belief. For others, the cost involved is prohibitive: an individual policy typically costs £80 a month, but will vary depending on your age and state of health.

However, before you rule it out, it’s worth checking what’s available through your work. Some employers will pay for it. Alternatively, they may provide access to cheaper medical insurance. They might also offer better terms, because while a private policy may rule out any existing conditions, your workplace cover may not.

If they don’t offer access to PMI, they may have a healthcare cash plan. These don’t offer anything like the same cover, but can be a more affordable alternative. If you pay for check-ups or treatment from a dentist, optician, physiotherapist, chiropodist or osteopath, you can reclaim at least some of the cost – usually up to an annual limit. You can get cover from around £10 a month, and if you regularly pay for these things, you can easily break even.

Some people will decide that they don’t want to pay for pet insurance, in case they never need to use it. Instead, they’ll opt to self-insure, and put aside cash each month, in case they need to pay for treatment later. This involves some risk, because if your pet is unwell before you’ve had the chance to save up, or if they suffer from something ruinously expensive, you will be left with a financial headache. However, it means there’s a cushion of cash as they get older.

Few of us take the same approach to our own health, saving monthly to build a nest egg just in case we need emergency private treatment. However, given that in May, 6.4 million patients were waiting for non-emergency treatment and over 300,000 had waited for more than a year, that‘s an awful lot of people living with conditions and illnesses that can have a huge impact on their quality of life. If, for example, they could pay for a hip operation costing around £13,500, rather than spending a year immobile and in pain, they may decide it’s worth the expense. If you don’t make any other provision for your health, it’s worth at least considering building a savings pot. You don’t need to put a huge amount aside, but building it every month will mean you don’t have to make the kinds of decisions over your own health that you wouldn’t accept for your pet.

Of course, pet insurance doesn’t just cover medical treatment. Policies will usually also pay out if your animal dies below a specific age. This is, of course, nothing like human life insurance, because it’s designed to cover the cost of replacing your pet. However, while you might like to think you’re irreplaceable, your loved ones may want to cover the cost of some of the things you do – like earn money – if you die or are too ill to work.

It’s alarming to think that you might have pet insurance, and yet not have life insurance to cover the cost of caring for your children if you died while they were young. The HL Savings & Resilience Barometer shows that there are 14 million households with children in Britain, and over half of them (57 per cent) don’t have enough life insurance cover to protect their families if something was to happen to them. The good news is that 2.4 million of them have a solution at their fingertips, because they can afford to close their life insurance gap from the spare cash they have at the end of the month – without leaving themselves short.

Meanwhile, people will often say they can’t afford income protection cover to replace at least some of their income if they’re too sick to work, because it tends to set you back somewhere between around £10 and £50 a month. However, this is a fraction of the potential cost of pet insurance.

Quite aside from insurance, we pay for a variety of other health-related services for our pets that we would never think to cover for ourselves. If we aren’t home for much of the day, or we have a demanding job, we might pay someone else to walk the dog and make sure it has all the exercise it needs. Meanwhile, we might be risking our health because we tell ourselves we don’t have enough time for exercise – or we can’t afford to pay for a gym or personal trainer to make sure it happens. Clearly it’s unfair to have an animal that doesn’t get enough exercise, but is it fair to ourselves to neglect this aspect of our own health? Similarly, vets can easily persuade us to sign up to a specialist food for our pets, especially as they get older and develop sensitivities. Meanwhile, we may be unconvinced that we need anything similar for ourselves.

Weighing up whether you need the same care as your own pet shouldn’t mean doubling your health costs overnight. However, it should mean that if you get a pay rise in future, you can consider using the extra wiggle room in your budget to cover a health need for you or your family.

The right answer to the most suitable level of cover will be different for everyone. The best one for my family and my dog is being insured up to our eyeballs. Given that I have a dog that eats shoes, a child that needed a diagnosis with a three-year waiting list, and a GP who is harder to make a date with than George Clooney, it feels like money well spent.

Rental prices rise again

New government figures show that rents are up 8.4%, in the year to August to an average of £1,286 across Great Britain. They’re up 7% in Yorkshire and the Humber, thanks to a perfect storm of landlords selling up in droves and an ever-increasing number of tenants.

There’s a risk that fears of potential changes to capital gains tax in the Budget force even more landlords to leave the market. Meanwhile, tenant numbers keep climbing. And while the government has committed to building more properties, this isn’t going to solve rental headaches overnight.

Right now, Zoopla figures show there are 21 tenants chasing each available property. The question is now much worse things will get before there’s light at the end of the tunnel for renters.