The True Cost of a Pet: First-Year Costs, Lifetime Budgets & Insurance vs Saving

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Add up everything Pepper needs before and right after moving in, group the one-off costs by category with SUMIFS, work out each category's share and let a formula name the single most expensive item.
• Turn bills that arrive weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly into one annual figure with a lookup, total them by category with SUMIFS and find Pepper's real monthly budget and which category dominates it.
• Project Pepper's yearly costs over her whole life with compound inflation and a fictional senior surcharge, add them up, convert the stream into today's money with NPV and express it as an average monthly amount.
• Weigh fictional vet bills by their yearly probability with SUMPRODUCT, compare young, adult and senior years, add up the expected vet cost over Pepper's life and see how much of it comes from rare big bills.
• Turn a fictional policy's premium, excess, reimbursement rate and annual limit into what the insurer pays and what Jonas pays in six scenarios, then find the vet bill at which the policy breaks even and the bill at which the limit kicks in.
• Let a fictional premium grow with Pepper's age, build running totals of premiums and expected claims and compare them over twelve years with one ratio.
• Plan a savings fund instead of a policy: how many months it takes to reach the target with and without interest, what monthly saving meets a deadline, and how big the fund grows if Pepper stays healthy.
• Price three ways to look after Pepper while Jonas travels – per trip and per year – find the trip length at which the cheapest option changes, and show the yearly costs in a column chart for the family decision.