This is all about pets. Our pet insurance yet again comes under Miscellaneous, but when doing the original proposals, we simply provided the cost of the pet insurance – we didn’t then realise that the vaccinations at over £30 a time for each cat annually (we have 3 cats) cannot be claimed back under the insurance but is essential. Also, we have had at least three incidents where we have had to take our cats to the emergency out of hours vets (broken legs etc that couldn’t wait) and they cost £95.00 just to be seen! On one occasion, after treatment it came to double that and we thought we would get it all back on the insurance but didn’t read the small print which said £80.00 excess – we are no longer with this company now, but it is still £45.00 excess AND takes well over a week to come through - the Emergency Vets say their contract with the insurers says they have up to 10 days to send the forms on to the insurers – and then they take several days to process the application. So we would need to increase this monthly figure from £15.00 to at least £30.00 - which doesn’t even cover the possible emergencies. Would this be acceptable? We had our cats long before we got into this situation and don’t like them suffering because of us.
Pet food
Pet food comes under our food budget. We were feeding our three cats the cheapest cat food and brekkies we could get from a local well-known cheap food store. One of our cats became very ill late last year and the vets diagnosed a very serious UTI and said she could have died. The vet worked out that the food was the likeliest culprit and they advised us not to buy any cat food with a particular chemical in it – which surprise surprise most of the cheaper foods had. This upset us unbelieveably because this was one of the times where we had had to delay emergency treatment because we literally had no money in our accounts and no one to borrow off - and the vet said she would have died if we had waited another day. When we did our original budget we didn’t break down the food budget into categories (food, toiletries, household stuff etc) – our IP just said our budget was classed as an acceptable amount for x2 adults, but I know a year ago we weren’t spending as much on cat food as we have to now! As seen from my earlier postings, we can't 'borrow' from any other areas!
Thanks, Sully
