Natasha and Chris Ashton were a month into their MBA programme at the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania when their year-old cat, Bodey, stopped eating. After a visit to the local clinic Bodey was transferred to a larger veterinary hospital where she was placed in intensive care for almost a week. Total bill: $5,000.
“When they told us, I could see the colour draining from Chris’s face,” recalls Ms Ashton. “We were already up to our eyeballs in debt from business school. But neither of us felt we could discontinue treatment: she was our baby.”
In retrospect, Bodey’s bout of pneumonia (the cat made a full recovery) might have been the best thing that happened to the entrepreneurial couple. On graduating from Wharton in 2003, the Ashtons founded Petplan North America, a pet insurance company, based in Philadelphia, that provides insurance for emergency veterinary costs and hereditary and congenital conditions.