Petty Cash is our series on what real people actually spend on their pets in a given month, from the weekly grocery run to the surprise vet bill to the truly unhinged splurge.
Here’s a number that sounds damning until you read the fine print: I spent $6,064.27 on my cat last month. Here’s the fine print. The food, treats, and litter that a cat genuinely needs came to about $148 of that. Nearly everything else was one vet visit and a place to live. If you want proof that “spoiling” a pet is mostly a story we tell ourselves, my bank statement is happy to testify.
Pet: Vinnie Barbarino, a seven-year-old Snowshoe Siamese Location: Los Angeles Combined household income: $160,000 My job: writer and comedian
How Vinnie found me
It was 2016, that stretch right before the year turned truly grim. Back then I lived in New York while my mom, an incurable foster, was down in New Jersey caring for a kitten she’d taken in through a local rescue. She hinted, heavily, that she’d keep him if my father weren’t inconveniently still alive, and told me I should at least come meet him. If the cat couldn’t be her son, she reasoned, he could be her grandson.
Meanwhile, my friends were pairing off and having babies, and I was at the life stage where my big move was convincing my roommates to let a small gorgeous prince move in. I met him, my mom had mistakenly been calling him Bailey, and he fell asleep in my lap within minutes. That was that. He was mine, and he became Vinnie.
He cost me nothing to adopt. His grandmother and the rescue covered everything.
The recurring costs
My up-front haul when I brought him home ran close to $150: a litter box, an apocalypse-sized supply of food and litter, one of every toy, and a bed he has, to this day, never acknowledged existed. I bought two of the Our Pets Play-N-Squeak Batting Practice Interactive Cat Toy, because he loved the first one so violently that he snapped it in half.
Insurance runs about $28 a month through Lemonade, which I chose largely because I’m powerless against a beautiful website. It’s basic vet-visit coverage, and full disclosure, I’ve never actually gotten a claim paid, partly because I forget to submit them and partly because the one time I did, it wasn’t covered. An impressive system of failure on both ends.
Then there are the subscriptions. I hand over $72.06 for a nominally “monthly” stash of assorted Fancy Feast, which somehow never lasts, so I drop roughly $30 more when my Chewy autoship falls short of an actual month. Every six months a 15-pound bag of Royal Canin Feline Health Nutrition Indoor Adult Dry Cat Food, which Vinnie knows only as “crunchies,” arrives for about $67.
The most expensive thing I’ve ever bought him wasn’t a single splurge, it was years of steady pampering. I’ve done carpentry, for him, not for me, building custom ledges under every window in the apartment so he can take his sun. I also put him on a cross-country flight when my partner and I (plus her cat) moved out to LA. Given how harrowing the trip was, I’d charter him a private jet if it shaved even a sliver of terror off the experience.
Now, the actual month
Week one
Fancy Feast Classic Pâté, Chicken & Beef, $21.99. Every single month, without fail, we run out of food early and need an “emergency” bag. This time my partner’s cat had staged one of her frequent hunger strikes against whatever was in the house, so this was an off-cycle purchase to keep her fed. (We have two cats between us and pool resources; if I covered both, this diary would run 7,000 words.)
Arm & Hammer Litter Baking Soda Double-Duty Cat Litter Deodorizer, $4.49. Vinnie is a hygiene queen, a trait he inherited from me, who was raised by a lovingly diagnosed germaphobe. This keeps the boxes smelling like they aren’t there.
Week two
Veterinary wellness visit, $638. For his seventh birthday, we threw a party, if you count a vet visit as a party and a round of vaccines as presents. He does not. He loathes the clinic, which means I loathe the clinic, because the betrayal on his face is total the whole time. Healthy and betrayed, at least.
Chewy autoship for Fancy Feast, $72. The aforementioned inadequate monthly shipment: 72 three-ounce cans of beef, chicken, poultry, and savory centers. We are, proudly, a pâté household. It’s never enough, which makes me suspect a third phantom cat prowls the apartment overnight, hoarding cans.
Native Pet Omega-3 Fish Oil & Alaskan Salmon Oil, $14.79. For my fellow TikTok casualties: you know the videos of people plating a gourmet meal for their pet and feeling like a monster? One of those shamed me into this. The comments assured me it’s cat-safe despite the “for dogs” label, and I give it in strict moderation, both because male cats shouldn’t have much fish and because it grants him what I can only describe as an award-winning stink. He is no longer eligible for that award.
Week three
Greenies Feline Catnip Flavor Adult Dental Cat Treats, $9. Vinnie is devoted to anything crunchy. If I hold a treat a couple feet above his head, he’ll rise onto his hind legs and wrestle it out of my fingers with his front paws, and I love it enough that we do it a few times a day. Or I scatter a handful across our high-pile rug and let him dig, because anything is an enrichment toy if you commit. Bonus: dental upkeep.
Scoop Away Complete Performance Scented Cat Litter, 42 pounds, $26. Roughly monthly, a rare flash of foresight hits and I order litter in bulk for delivery, on account of my arms having the load capacity of wet paper towels.
Week four
Security deposit, $5,250. In two years in our current place, we’ve had two separate mold blooms in the floors, walls, and ceilings. The first should have been our exit; the second finally was. I’m badly allergic, and I strongly suspect Vinnie is as well, which sent us hunting for a new (fingers crossed) mold-free rental nearby. Yes, we relocated partly for the cat’s health, which makes this, definitively, a pet expense. The clincher, beyond the blessed lack of mold, was a walled-in back patio where the cats can wander, leashed and supervised. When mold remediation once forced us out, we stayed with friends who had a patio Vinnie loved so much he’d scream if we sat out there without him. Consider this our low-budget “We Bought a Zoo.”
The tally
Total monthly spend: $6,064.27
- Pet insurance: $28
- Medications and routine care: $638
- Grooming accessories: $0
- Food: $93.99
- Treats: $23.79
- Toys: $0
- Lounge accessories: $0
- Walk accessories: $0
- Clothes and wearable accessories: $0
- Litter: $30.49
- Security deposit for a pet-friendly rental: $5,250
The most outrageous thing I’ve bought him, by the way, isn’t on this month’s list. It’s one big rope. Outrageous in spirit, not in price ($16.99). I saw a TikTok of a cat besotted with a rope and correctly pegged Vinnie as a fellow rope devotee.
What the numbers actually say
Look at that breakdown and the “spoiled cat” narrative quietly collapses. Strip out the vet visit and the apartment deposit, both real, both cat-adjacent, both once-in-a-while, and Vinnie’s ongoing footprint is food, treats, and litter: roughly $148. For context, national surveys peg the average cat owner’s spending at around $57 a month, and the whole US pet industry crossed $158 billion in 2025, so plenty of us are quietly running numbers like these. The “splurges” people picture, the toys, the outfits, the face-printed merch, are the columns sitting at zero. The money goes where it always goes for indoor cats: keeping them fed, keeping them healthy, and keeping a roof, ideally a mold-free one, over their sunbathing little heads.
Which is a long way of admitting that after tallying all of this, my honest reaction was a creeping fear that I’m somehow not spoiling him enough. I’ll bring that to therapy next week, right before I clear out half an aisle at Petco. Purely as insurance.
