• Dates: 2026-05-10 - present
  • Status: unfinished
  • Importance: 5

Raising a dog on a budget

(Cross-posted to the Early Retirement Extreme forum and later the Mr. Money Mustache forum.)

Dog vaccines

My girlfriend and I recently got an Australian labradoodle puppy that we adore!

We took him to the vet this week and were shocked by the price of the first-year health package: ~$1300! It includes vaccines worth apparently ~$800, plus fecal testing and other things we’re not sure we need. This motivated me to use Claude to search for (a) which vaccines are truly critical and (b) more economical providers of such. Our current plan is to get three core vaccines – rabies, DAPPi, and lepto – and to get these at Animal Rescue League of Boston and Second Chance Community Veterinary Hospital of Worcester. The total should be about $95!!

This got me thinking about other cost savings in raising a dog. I plan to post about our journey here, and would love to hear others’ tips/thoughts! I sense dog ownership isn’t the most ERE thing (maybe that’s why I couldn’t find any forum posts on dog vaccines), but the dog makes my girlfriend quite happy, and I think ERE principles apply here too!