I was pretty happy to find out that our flexible spending account for health care costs has a grace period, so that the ‘technical’ deadline for our 2010 purchases wasn’t actually December 31st.
We actually got until March 15th of this year to make purchases that would count against last year’s tallies.
Going into the end of the year, we’d pretty much evened out, and had $7.66 left. Once I did my homework and found that they had the grace period, I didn’t worry about trying to find a way to spend the last of the money (I wasn’t about to let a penny of it expired) and let it roll over until we had a bill that we actually needed it on.
When I paid the bill for a recent dental check-up, they applied the first $7.66 against last year’s balance, and the remaining toward the new contribution amount we have setup for 2011.
That was cool! I’ve done a lot of complaining about our benefits, but that’s a small perk that actually worked out OK. I wouldn’t be surprised if the government has or will soon close this loophole, as I could imagine that it would probably leave more balances to expire (balances which would then not have tax write-off implications), but it worked out OK for us in any case!
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