D.C. Area Nesties
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
question about dependent care accounts
I've never done one of these before (or an FSA). Our daycare expenses are about $850/month right now, or about $10,000/year.The max you can allot for a dependent care account is $5000 total/year.
I have the option to accelerate my allotments to keep pace with our actual expenses. If I split the allotments out evenly over the whole year, that would only work out to about $415 a month--or half of our expenses. On the other hand, accelerating them would mean paying a lot of money up front out of pocket (and I'm not sure how long it would take to get reimbursed).
Anyone done this? Thoughts or suggestions?
Re: question about dependent care accounts
I've never done the acceleration but I know that with dependent care, the rule is that they won't pay out the money until you've paid in the money. So, for me, I spend $5K in daycare out of pocket in the first three months of the year and I then submit those receipts. But since I haven't contributed the full $5K yet, they can't pay it out. So, each paycheck, $192 gets deducted (pre-tax), then about 2 weeks later, $192 gets deposited from the FSA company. I won't get my full $5K back until after my last pay check for the end of December.
With the accelerated plan, it sounds like more money would get deducted earlier and therefore more money would get paid back earlier. From a purely financial perspective, I believe that this plan would make better financial sense because you would have your pre-tax money in your pocket earlier in the year (and could theortically invest it and make more money).
The only downside is that your paycheck would be smaller in the beginning of the year (but as long as your FSA management company is good, you would have that money back within 2 weeks or so if you submit your receipts).
I hope that makes sense. If I had the choice, I would probably do the accelerated plan. However, in the end, I believe you come out even from a dollar perspective with both plans. The only difference is you have the opportunity loss of being able to invest the pre-tax money if you have it sooner. But in order to take advantage of this, you have to take a lower paycheck in the beginning which could mess up your budget if it's really tight.
This is what we decided, too. Thanks for your input, ladies!
TTC #2: BFP 12/17/11, m/c 1/7/12 and D&C 1/12/12
baby blog/cooking blog
