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Open Enrollment Completed

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Thank you so much for all the tips and comments on my Open Enrollment post! I really found the comments to be insightful and incredibly helpful as I decided on my plans.

In the end, I opted to keep my current insurance (a PPO) and a flex spending account for both health and dependent care purchases. I may still switch to an HSA in the future, but didn’t feel comfortable doing so without any EF whatsoever right now. So it will be a consideration in future years, but not at this time.

I increased the amount of deductions for my health HSA but reduced the deductions for my dependent care HSA. And the cost of my medical insurance went up a little as well.

In the end, here are the benefits-related deductions I’ll see per paycheck:

In my open enrollment post, I’d posted all of my paycheck deductions (including required investment, taxes, parking permit, etc.) But to do an apples-to-apples comparison of just the benefits-related deductions (including health insurance, dental insurance, and the two FSA contributions), here’s how things stack up:

2016 per paycheck deduction = $382.90

2017 per paycheck deduction = $340.33

So I’ll be saving a little bit per check, but its really a pretty negligible amount. I also hope to reduce the amount of taxes taken out (pending the CPA’s review), so I may be able to “add back” a little bit more money to my take-home pay after our 2016 taxes have been finalized.

All in all, it’s still a pretty large deduction per paycheck, but I have excellent insurance and am happy with our coverage thus far. I pay for my dad’s health insurance (albeit out of his own funds, but I am the money-manager), and he pays $1,000/month for private insurance for a single individual with crappy coverage! Ugh! So I know I am really very lucky to have such good coverage at such a great rate! And as an aside, my Dad’s birthday is in March and at that time he’ll be eligible for Medicare, which would be great because that will give him some cancer coverage. So hopefully that means a big reduction in his  health insurance costs.

I just wanted to follow-up to let everyone know what we’d decided regarding open enrollment. Thanks, again, for all your helpful suggestions!

 


3 Comments

  • Reply angie |

    I see there are some earned income requirements for the dependent fsa. The max limit is based on the lower earning spouses income. With DH in school full time have you made sure to correctly calculate the maximum you can contribute?

  • Reply Walnut |

    The silver lining on potentially over-withholding taxes is any excess should (in theory) reduce your overall debt to the IRS.

  • Reply Lisa |

    I know that 42.57 seems like such a small amount to some, but that would be awesome for my family! That’s a savings of 1054.82 a year. 🙂

So, what do you think ?