If you signed up for a Flexible Savings Account to pay for your medical expenses with untaxed wages, you may be coming up on feeling like you’ve been a little too healthy for your own good — if you didn’t spend all of the money that you put in your FSA account this year, it will soon vanish.
Kay Bell of Don’t Mess With Taxes has some advice for people with an end-of-year FSA account surplus, including no-brainers like getting your teeth cleaned or signing up for a routine annual physical, to good ideas like getting a back-up pair of eyeglasses or a cache of batteries for your hearing aid, filling up the medicine cabinet with a year’s supply of whatever you turn to in times of flu or bad leftovers, or picking up a Hurricane Katrina-sized emergency first aid kit.
And I would add that you might want to consider switching from an FSA to a Health Savings Account. An HSA doesn’t have the spend-it-or-lose-it feature that makes FSA accounts so annoying.