Alright, before you ask, yes, I know spending $9,000 on a dog is absurd, and it's extreme,

but when you don't have any human children, you get to waste all your money on your

four-legged ones. Welcome back to this week's episode of The Money with Katie Show

Rich Family. I am your host, Katie Gatti Tossan, and today we are talking about the pet

insurance decision. Now, I maintain that one of the hardest things about being an

adult is discerning which types of insurance are a total rip-off, and which are actually

worthwhile. There are a surprising amount of perspectives online. You've got, on one

end of the spectrum, literal insurance salesmen who will recommend a whole life policy to

a 23-year-old teacher making $40,000 per year with no dependence. Yeah, and then on the

other end of the spectrum, you have Pete Adney of Mr. Money Mustache, who famously does

not even carry health insurance because he says he self-insures instead. One such I am

unsure if this is legitimate or a scam product is pet insurance. So growing up, my family

and I always had at least four stray cats living in our house at any given time, and my

parents never carried any pet insurance, so I was surprised when it was offered as a benefit

at my first job, and depending on who I asked, I heard wildly different experiences.

Some people swore it absolutely saved them, and they would never go without it. Other

people insisted, hey, this is a huge waste of money, it didn't end up covering anything

worthwhile. And so, in other words, it sounds representative of the polar opposite experiences

people have with insurance, whether or not they end up needing it.

According to a market watch survey, about 45% of pet owners carry insurance, and making

matters more complicated, each and every policy is different. And it's worth acknowledging

at the outset, these insurance companies don't lose, right? At the aggregate level, they

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