Furry friends finance

Pet bills planning

Pets get MRI scans these days, or as vets humorously call them ‘‘cat’’ scans. Cat scans may help diagnose joint and bone damage, but they don’t come cheap.

Laurie Lowther from Pet Funders says cat scans can cost upwards of $1500, which is a bill few pet owners can manage without help.

Some have pet insurance, but even those who do often have to pay first, and claim later, resulting in them have to find the fourfigure sum themselves.

Some treatments can cost even more.

Medical advancements and people’s willingness to stump up ever larger sums to cure their pets have resulted in treatments once reserved for humans now being offered for dogs and cats.

This includes cancer treatments, which Lowther says can cost an owner over $5000.

Surgery after being hit by a car, or eating something toxic or indigestible, can cost thousands. In one case, Lowther says a dog that ate glue ended up costing their owner over $14,000.

In one shockingly expensive case, Lowther said the owner of a Pomeranian spent $17,000 on surgery to treat a condition where its brain was growing, but its skull wasn’t.

Even relatively well-paid pet owners would struggle to pay some of these bills.

Lowther set Pet Funders up to help pet owners pay for expensive treatment, as well as giving vets the comfort to go ahead with scans, operations and animal chemotherapy knowing their bills would be paid.

It offers short-term loans of three, six or nine months, which owners apply for through their vet, which has to sign up with Pet Funders to offer the service.

The whole process only takes a few minutes, and that includes the credit checking, which is done by artificial intelligence.

Pet Funders charges interest of 1.85 per cent of the amount borrowed each month, and there’s an application fee of $65.

A vet bill of $2000 funded by Fee Funders, and paid back over six months with the fee added to the loan, would result in total interest paid of around $222.

Lowther said the Fee Funders’ loans were an alternative to other forms of debt like credit cards, but had the advantage of being repaid over an agreed time period.

Spreading the payments made agreeing to treatment more palatable for owners, Lowther said. And for vets it means being paid immediately.

The typical loan size is around $2000-$3000, Lowther said, but it was early days, and Pet Funders is only being offered through a handful of clinics, though the number was rising fast.

‘‘When you take your pet to the vet, you could find yourself facing $2000-$3000 worth of expenses. That’s a lot of money for a pet,’’ he said. ‘‘If you were to go back 30 years, people would have been horrified by the amount we spend on our pets.’’

‘‘We have got vets giving animals MRIs. It is a full MRI cat scan, and there are now full-on cancer treatments for pets as well.’’

Pet Funders is just one of a related group of companies which help people spread payments for big ticket items including funerals, real estate marketing fees, and accountants’ fees.

Pet-owners have various ways they can cope with big bills for medical treatment for their animals.

Options include:

Pet insurance. Dog and cat owners pay premiums every month. There are different grades of cover with excesses to pay. The pet owner effectively pays more in premiums than the average pet owner would pay for vets’ bills over the lifetime of the policy, but gets immediate cover should treatment be required.

Saving an animal medical fund. This could involve finding out what pet insurance would cost, and then setting it aside each month. But if a bill fell early in an animal’s life a loan may be the only option.

Debt. Borrowing to pay for animal treatments is a big call, but credit cards, and Pet Funders are both options.

Euthanasia. If the cost of treatment is too high, then a family can refuse to pay and ask the vet to put the animal down. It’s a sticky moral dilemma for the owner and the vet.