Furry Finances: The Average Cost of Raising a Pet is £10,975

A new online tool works out how much money users spend on their pets over each animals' lifetime.

• Tortoise: £27,787 over 75 years
• Small dog: £19,224 over 15 years
• Large dog: £17,234 over 11.5 years
• Medium dog: £16,828 over 11.5 years
• Cat: £12,322 over 16 years

For the 35% of fish-owners who claim their aquatic pet makes them feel more relaxed, there's some good news. Goldfish are the UK's most affordable pet. With costs amounting to £914 over a typical 7.5 years, this soothing species is the ultimate low-cost pet option. In an age of celebrity pets and cult animal Instagram accounts, it's more tempting than ever before to take on animals flippantly. These fresh resources are an informative antidote, packed with facts and helpful calculations, ideal for keeping your eye on your spending and educating users about the true costs of pet ownership. Yet the TotallyMoney survey results also reveal that, despite the costs, only 2% of UK pet owners regret getting their animal and have considered getting rid of it. In fact, 95% of dog owners consider their four-legged friend to be a family member. Even after telling cat owners that their pet would cost them the same amount as a deposit on a house, 88% claimed they'd rather have the cat. Whatever the cost, there's clearly no preventing Brits from pampering their pets. For even more mind-bending statistics about the UK's pet obsession take a look at TotallyMoney's brand new infographic.   METHODOLOGY How we determined the average lifetime cost of each pet:

• Firstly we found the average lifespan of the UK’s 10 most popular household pets.
• We then determined each expenditure typically associated with each pet & whether these were purchased as a one-off, each month or annually (for expenditures where we were unclear of how often they were purchased, we initiated a survey).
• To determine the average cost for the majority of each pets’ expenditures, we took the highest and lowest value on an authoritative pet ecommerce store to find the median cost.
• If the expenditure was purchased monthly, the value was then multiplied by 12, which gave us the average annual cost.
• Once we had the annual costs of each expenditure, we were then able to multiple the values by the average amount of years each pet lives to.
• These were then added together, along with the one-off expenditures, to determine the average cost of each pet throughout its lifetime.

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