How to Get ripped off by your Flex account.
So for tw0 years I kept a Flex Spending account in case something happened and I needed enough money for the hospital/doctor etc. Well, with my not doing reenactment I have managed to spend my first year in ages undamaged really, and only had to get a checkup. So there was a significant amount of money left over.
From http://www.shps.com/myshps/fsa/faqs.stm:
Q: What if I have money left in my account at the end of the year?
A: Under current IRS regulations, you forfeit that money. This is known as the “Use-It-Or-Lose-It” rule. It’s important to consider all your potential expenses when deciding how much to contribute to your FSA. The FSA Calculator can help you plan your annual contribution.NOTE: The IRS allows employers to add an extension that might enable you to incur expenses for 2 1/2 months beyond the current plan year to help use any remaining FSA funds. Check with your employer to see if this extension is available to you.
What this doesn’t say forthright is that you still dont even get access to the remaining funds (in my case $773.10), you have 2 and 1/2 months to find an eligible arena to spend the money, and SHPS will reimburse you at a later date – again only if it eligible, meaning they have to approve the transaction, meaning you have to spend the money, and see if they will reimburse you again.
Bottom line, I am not even remote interested in being ripped off by this again. There is ZERO reason this program shouldn’t attempt to reimburse unspent money.
Yep this rule blows ass. Sorry to hear that you got screwed.
That’s why when I left GPC and had like $500ish left in my account so I made a regular doctors appt. and an eye doctor appt. upon which I did get a pair of Ralph Lauren reading glasses. 🙂 And then with the $200ish I had left I went to CVS and bought a shit load of advil, heating pads, cold medicine, first aid kits (one for the shop, house and boat) and anything else medically related I thought I could use at some point. Cause also the flip side to that rule (that they don’t tell you) is that if you leave the company and use all of your FSA money before you have technically paid for it through the end of the year, then GPC has to eat it. Cause when I left in June I had only paid in like 300 of my 900 FSA funds. But I had access to the entire 1k, not just the 300 or whatever I had paid so far. So needless to say that put a nice smile on my face that I was able to stick it a little to GPC there at the end. 🙂
I know this won’t make you feel any better, but the reason the FSA accounts are a loose it or use it stem from the fact that the funds set aside are made available in full at the start of the plan year. If you set aside $1000, have a qualifying event, use the full $1000 in the FSA, then quite or are fired from your job in, for sake of example, February (1 month into the plan year), YOU are under zero obligation to pay any of that money back. Over the course of several years I have forfeited close to $1000 in unspent FSA funds. It is a knife that cuts both ways with equal risks to the funders as well as the fundees.
If you want the assurances to carry the contingency funds forward, look into the HSA programs as opposed to the FSA programs.