Budgets with an FSA account

[iowabergmanns]

Does anyone have an medical FSA account where pre-tax deductions are taken from your gross pay and then reimbursed to you periodically as you in cur expenses? My wife has an FSA account and it causes her pay to go up or down from pay period to pay period depending on how much we request for reimbursement. We also have an HSA account and it's the same theory.

How do people incorporate these accounts into their budget?

[project15]

Our HSA has a debit card, so we pay for medical expenses with that rather than out of pocket and wait to get reimbursed.

But related to your situation - I always have a couple hundred dollars of wiggle room in my bank account for reimbursement situations.

[sweeps]

Yes, I have an FSA. Mine sounds like it's slightly different in that I receive checks in the mail as a reimbursement. So my regular paycheck doesn't change, but checks that I get vary from month to month.

Here's how I do it... I don't count on the reimbursement checks. The money I get from the checks is extra that I didn't count on.

You have a couple options, you could either do like I do, and consider you're wife's lowest paycheck as her regular paycheck. Then when it's higher, that's "found money"... put it in savings. If that doesn't work for you, then you could go through all your wife's past paychecks and average them out to get an income estimate.