When I got laid off in June, I was offered COBRA as a healthcare option. The cost would have been $716 per month. One of the problems with COBRA is that it you can only be on it for 18 months. It is considered a temporary bridge until you find another job. But, since I am not sure if I’m going to find another job, I decided to use the State healthcare exchange website to find a cheaper option. I found a plan for $550 per month and was allowed to join outside of the enrollment period because my employer sponsored healthcare was being terminated. The bill finally came in today and now I have to find a way to pay for it! They don’t accept credit cards, which would have been ideal, because I could get 2% cash back on this rather large monthly expense. The only option was to setup a direct bill pay to a checking or savings account. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I decided to use my investment cash account which has a check writing option. I redirected all of my monthly interest and dividends to the cash account to help pay the monthly insurance bill. I also had to get dental coverage, so that pushes the monthly bill to $600. For now, I’m paying full price, but I expect that next year I will qualify for some type of tax credit or medical assistance. I could have gone with a cheaper plan, but a deductible of $3000 was the highest I cared to live with. The other concern is that healthcare insurance is going up every year. This is the biggest expense in my $2000 monthly budget. But, without it I would be wiped out financially, if there was a health emergency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I got laid off in June, I was offered COBRA as a healthcare option. The cost would have been $716 per month. One of the problems with COBRA is that it you can only be on it for 18 months. It is considered a temporary bridge until you find<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=97"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99,"href":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions\/99"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=97"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=97"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.budgethomepage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=97"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}