Tis the season for the Government to get it’s jollies and confiscate your FSA account. The FSA is a great addition to a family budget, it is a work sponsored account that allots pre tax income to a fund that can be used to cover out of pocket, qualified medical expenses. Since the roll out of the Affordable Care Act the maximum balance you can allot to a FSA account is $2500, and I do recommend that you employ such an account if your employer allows you to.
Our family budgets $600 per year to the FSA, the goal is to have enough in there to cover medical co-pays and prescription costs, and yet not too much that it becomes a pain to liquidate the account annually, since the government has made this one a ‘use it or lose it’ account where anything left in there after December 31st for the year is simple swept away and used to fund Starbucks runs for epic filibuster sessions. Here’s some suggestions on how to spend up your money before December 31st.
Contact Lenses
This is my goto- I buy a brand called Focus Dailies. You need to do some shopping around for the best price, if you want to see how I do this, and leverage shopping portals, cashback, coupons etc checkout The Ultimate Guide to Shopping Online where I go step by step through my Contact Lens purchase online. One thing that is a slight pain in the butt is that these online stores still require you to have an eye exam and fax/scan them the Prescription. So you may need to get a new eye exam done in the next few days if you haven’t had one recently.
Stuff for now and stuff for later
Birth control (including condoms) count as FSA eligible items, you can stock up on these for the cold winter months, or you can plan ahead to the summer and buy some sunscreen, again it qualifies. A really helpful thing in spending your dollars is that major online retailers have FSA sub-sections, so you can browse around and fill up your cart. A good one is Drugstore.com since it allows you to capture some great shopping cashback too, if you haven’t got time to read my epic ‘Ultimate Guide’ above here is the condensed version:
Go here to BROWSE ONLY http://www.drugstore.com/fsa-store/qxg59875-0
- You can fill your cart up if you like, but DO NOT CHECKOUT
Go here to pick your bonus portal: http://evreward.com/store/go/721
- Go back to Drugstore.com via the portal that you like from Evreward, and earn a bonus of upto 10% Cashback! Now checkout, your cart should remember what was in it, or alternatively start the whole shopping process here.
The best two categories would be:
- BigCrumbs (5%) or Ebates (8%) I personally don’t use Ebates despite it offering more, I prefer Bigcrumbs, but I hear that other people like it.
- Card Specific – if you hold a version of the Discover card you can access the Shop Discover portal and gain 10% Cash back.
Affiliate Disclosure, the Bigcrumbs link is as a ‘conga’ type link where by inviting you I get a share of revenue. This doesn’t impact your cashback, it just means that Bigcrumbs sends me a very small percentage of cashback for people I introduce. To understand Conga type Affiliate Links check out this post on my Disclosure Policy. Ebates is not an Affiliate link.
I can’t think of anything that highlights how f***ed up the US healthcare and tax system is than the humble FSA. Everyone, go rush out now and spend the money on needless services because otherwise it goes back to your employer!
It certainly is a good way to see how bad things are, sadly there are so many different things we could use to highlight how screwy things are with taxes and health care in the US.
It is worth checking what the rules of your FSA are. I am a federal employee and use the FSAFEDs program, and for my 2013 FSA I am allowed to make claims on expenses made up to mid-March, 2014 (maybe March 15). So, you may not necessarily need to rush out and spend money by the 31st.
And, of note, this year they added massage therapy to the list of expenses that can be covered with no doctor’s note. Hooray!