Yay for Flexible Spending Accounts!
Just got a check in the mail reminding me how much I like the health care FSA. My only complaint is that the partner’s company has such a low cap on it ($1,500). But, I love knowing that we just processed a claim for 70% of our annual allocation when only 10% of our annual allocation has actually been collected so far. It’s nice that I don’t have to wait until the funds have actually accrued to make use of them.
When we set up the daughter’s second round of orthodontic care, we established a monthly payment plan for the next two years. I really didn’t want to add another $150 to our monthly budget, so I made an extra payment in January so that I could reduce the monthly payments to just $50 for the year and make an immediate claim against our FSA. Of course, this totally confused their billing department and it took way more explaining and re-explaining (ie. “you’ll be getting the same amount this year, just one large payment in January will make the monthly payments smaller”, rinse, repeat) than it should have. I expect our medical bills will exceed this years allocation, so we’re holding off until the middle of the year when we expect to see another decent size medical bill to use the remaining funds.
We also finally put in a claim for last years FSA as well, which we had limited to only several hundred since we weren’t sure we would use the full amount. I like that the claim was simple because we had one payment larger than our 2007 allocation and I didn’t need to add up all the smaller copays and fees. I wish I could say that this chunk of change will help us in our current fight to get back on top of a $3,000 deficit. While the orthodontic treatment was part of that overage in December, the reimbursement won’t go very far in correct the imbalance.