Tag: health insurance

A Health Savings Account is supposed to stay with you for life, but if you do not use it, you could lose actually lose it.

HSAs are intended to make medical expenses more affordable by allowing consumers with high-deductible health plans to set aside pretax money in an account that, unlike a Flexible Spending Account, will not expire at the end of the year.

You can keep these accounts as you change jobs, which allows you to build up funds that you can spend as you need to or save for retirement.

NEW YORK (REUTERS) - Choosing health insurance for a family used to be easier, with fewer options and fewer households where parents were each covered by their own workplace plans instead of picking a joint one.

But now more and more families must make a choice at every open enrollment period about how to cover the kids due to the advent of surcharges and exclusions for covering spouses who have the option of their own workplace insurance.

Your big day has come and gone. Now it’s time to make important decisions to protect the well-being of your growing family, as well as your future. You and your spouse will most likely have a lot of questions regarding the ins and outs of heath coverage. Here are four of the most common questions and how to navigate your best options as a new couple.

Can we still enroll in health insurance? Getting married is considered a Qualifying Life Event, so newlyweds have the unique opportunity to enroll in health insurance outside of the national Open Enrollment Period. You and your new spouse have 60 days from the time you get married to shop for a Marketplace health insurance plan.

With luck, most of us match our family income to our costs of living and come out ahead of the game. At times, of course, we may experience a run of expenses, often unanticipated, that cause us to dip into savings or even float a temporary loan to tide us over. As long as the problems are resolvable and the costs controllable, we can usually work our way out of the difficulty. There are, however, circumstances that spell real trouble. Let’s look at a few of these situations to see what can go wrong and how they may be tackled.

1. Family illness. One of the principal reasons for economic hardship, often resulting in the filing of personal bankruptcy, is serious family illness. Medical services are expensive.