health insurance

May Financial Update

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After not wanting to know the details of March’s expenses because Mr. ODA threw me a surprise party, I was pleasantly surprised to see our spending in April. Now, with that said, while my categorization of expenses cover April 1-30, my stories here go through this date in May. And May has been a doozy.

We changed our insurance carrier as of May 1. We put a concerted effort into getting some routine things out of the way before our insurance changed because we weren’t too confident in the new policy’s coverage. Mr. ODA got a physical. I got an eye exam, which is more expense ($116) due to the contact fitting, and became more expensive when we moved on to acknowledging the astigmatism that we’ve ignored for the last 5 years because it’s so slight. Then that leads to buying contacts ($300). I do need to submit the reimbursement request for the contacts that I paid out of pocket for, so at least some of that should come back.

In mid-April, I started having chest pain. That lead to us wiping out the deductible. Such unfortunate timing. We could have walked away from that policy only needing a couple of hundred applied to the deductible, and then I didn’t take care of myself while sick, so the virus attacked the wall of my heart. Lovely. My first office appointment was at a new clinic, and they said if I paid in full, they’d apply a 10% discount. I’ve had to learn to navigate the world of medical billing (even more in depth than I already had due to poorly executed claims) because of the deductible concept. So the lady’s statement was correct – I still owed about $3000 on my deductible. That’s what she billed me. That’s a normal statement for me to hear. What I hadn’t thought about was – but who will get there first? If her claim wasn’t first in line, then my deductible payment wouldn’t go to her. Narrator: she was not first in line. So now I’ve paid $3k to this company, but I only actually owe her about $900. Meanwhile, the one who was first in line now wants their payment, understandably. I’m trying to hold off on that until after the 20th so that it’s on the next credit card cycle. And through all of this, I also need to fix my log in to my old insurance account to be able to verify that they’ve even accounted for my deductible correctly because I swear I’ve overpaid my deductible the last two years due to too many claims happening at one time, but it’s convoluted and I’ve just given up tracking it both years (I know, this is against everything I tell you to do, but shew, it’s been quite the year or so around here).

On top of that, Mr. ODA works at Lowe’s, and they have a spring holiday period where employees get a 20% discount. So now there’s a ton of Lowe’s transactions on our credit card that’s inflating our spending. While the details of that will be in next month’s update, it is reflected in the net worth calculation I have here since these are current numbers.

RENTALS

We got one house rented as of May 1. That was an anticipated project, and the tenant who left had lived there for 6.5 years. We were gone the first week of April, so we ended up losing the month of income, but the actual work to turn it over took very few hours (at least compared to most of the turnover we do). There’s one more house outstanding to know if she’s renewing, and there’s one house that will turn over at the end of June. That woman moved in over the winter on a 6 month lease. She’s been extremely difficult, and I’m not sad to see her go. For instance, it’s the 22nd, and she still hasn’t paid May’s rent. The good news is that the turnover should go quickly since we did a massive effort to spruce it up at the last turnover.

NET WORTH

The market has recovered a bit, so we’re trending up again instead of stagnant on the net worth. I categorized our spending for April, but since we took a trip, the ‘entertainment’ category is taking over the graph.

I took out the expenses related to our trip to see what was left. Entertainment is still high because we spent $785 on season passes for skiing next year. This also include our daughter’s gymnastics and our gym membership. Just funny that the graph didn’t change because our proportion of spending was the same.

Over the past few months, I’ve worked on increasing our monthly cash flow a bit with rent increases. This isn’t a money-maker, but just trying to stay on top of the routine cost increases (e.g., taxes, insurance) that are coming our way. Once all the increases go into effect, it’ll be another $400 per month. But that’s also contingent on what we get the house that’s turning over rented at. That seems like a lot, but you’d be surprised at what our cost increases are. I usually do a post comparing all those changes in the Fall.

This month our cash went down too because I had to pay the health insurance costs and three houses worth of taxes. I updated our home values now that it’s the spring market; I update these numbers about twice per year.

Post Employment Health Insurance

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We have been financially secure for Mr. ODA to quit working for years. In fact, the plan was that after he met the requirements for his paternity leave taken (which was essentially work the number of hours you took as leave), he would quit. That goal was met back in early 2023. The hold up for him quitting was always health insurance. Him working wasn’t a huge detriment to our life and things we wanted to do, and he was getting most of his health insurance cost covered by his employer.

Well, at the beginning of 2025, the deferred resignation program was introduced. While the first round was very questionable, our life was greatly affected by his employment and the government over the next few weeks, so it was a no-brainer to take the program during the second round. His last day of work was at the end of April, but he was considered employed and paid through September 30th.

As part of his separation, his health insurance was covered for about another month. He had the option to extend his current insurance for another 18 months after that, and that he’d be responsible for paying the full premium. At the time, it was about $1700, and the 2026 premium is $1900 per month.

MRS. ODA’S INSURANCE OPTION

Meanwhile (just coincidental timing), my current employer was investigating a new insurance policy for their employees across 4 offices. They were originating their insurance through the Ohio office. It was a really expensive policy for them. For the 5 people who were taking advantage of that insurance policy, they could have covered 23 employees on this new policy. We learned that Ohio is one of the most expensive states to originate insurance out of it, so we moved the policy to Kentucky.

Anyway, through that process, the insurance sales person was completely incapable of answering basic insurance type questions. Mr. ODA asked for the brochure of benefits. He said, “I emailed you the summary of benefits.” Mr. ODA pointed out that the summary of benefits was a summary of a much larger document, and we wanted those details. He said that didn’t exist. Mr. ODA called the actual insurance company, and that lady laughed and said they definitely have that.

The policy also required a gap coverage policy. The information given to me did not make me feel like it was going to be a smooth process. It sounded like the doctor’s office would submit the claim to my main insurance company. Once it was processed, I’d have to take my bill and EOB and submit it to the gap coverage company for payment. So I’d have to manage the paperwork processing and the payments between everyone.

Their quote for the family policy was about $1750. I told Mr. ODA that it wasn’t worth all that extra effort and the concern that this insurance policy would even work right (because this sales person was not able to answer questions or quell concerns), just to save about $150.

FINAL DECISION

So in the end, we decided to keep the enemy we know. All of our doctors are now solidly in place since we’ve been in Lexington for 3.5 years. I didn’t want to risk needing to switch to a different doctors office because of eligibility and coverage. I didn’t want to risk the coverage being a fight even more than my current policy creates. But mostly, in case something did end up going awry with this new policy option, we couldn’t get our old policy back. So while adding $1900 to our monthly expenses while losing Mr. ODA’s income isn’t the most ideal situation, this is where we’re at in life.

July Financial Update

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Well, we started the month with way too many things hitting the credit card: 2 insurance policy renewals, a new insurance policy, air conditioning fix at a rental, and bathroom replacement at a rental. That eventually led to a $1500 charge for bat removal at another rental.

PERSONAL

My big news this month was handling my HOA’s annual meeting. We’ve been working so hard for the last year, and I tried really hard this year to increase communication between the Board and community. I think I did a good job because there wasn’t any contentious point of this meeting and there were very little questions. I received nice feedback on how I presented the budget and that I did a good job throughout the year. It was a welcomed win since there was a lot of heat in the previous couple of years.

The family’s big news is getting passports for a trip this Fall. The parents already have theirs, but we got the kids their pictures and submitted their application. So our credit card balance is higher than normal because we paid for flights and the cruise itself.

It took us until the last week of June to meet our deductible on our health insurance. It’s only $3,300, so that’s quite the impressive feat. I’d point out that my March surgery took until then to get processed correctly, but at least we eventually got there. I have very little faith that it’s all processed correctly though, so it’s on my to do list to verify that we’re not overpaying into that deductible, which they don’t make easy because they don’t show me prescription fills clearly.

We went on a trip for a long weekend to visit Mr. ODA’s aunt in WV. They have a vacation house there, so we didn’t pay for lodging. Unexpectedly, they provided all our meals. I bought them a gift card and some beer. So between that gift, gas, and the meals on either end of the trip, we spent about $200 for a trip, and it was one of the best vacations I’ve been on.

Two of the kids spent this past week at camps. One was 3 hours per day at a dance studio, and the other was 9.5 hours of all outdoor time for the week. He had a blast, and I’m kind of jealous that he got to play all those games and have a great week.

RENTALS

This month, I received an email from Rent App that a tenant was paying their rent. She didn’t give me a heads up, so I wanted to verify things with her. She said this app pays me in full, but it takes the first half of the payment from her account at the beginning of the month and then the second half of the payment in the middle of the month. They’ve lived with me for for 8 years, so I’m surprised she sought out this option instead of talking to me about a payment plan. The program was extremely sketchy and I didn’t feel good about a single step of it. I gave up the registration process at the point that it required untethered access to my phone, but I wish I would have followed my gut at the first personal information step, as if it wasn’t bad enough I had to give my bank account details for the transfer to happen. The payment eventually came through on the 10th, but I didn’t feel good about it.

Another tenant paid late with the late payment. And another tenant paid late with little to no communication and several follow up conversations. I can’t stand when I have to hunt down money. I’m willing to work with everyone who reaches out. She paid the first one with a (1/3), so clearly she knew the plan. And yet, on the 6th, I had to ask where the rest of the rent was. She said it would be done that day. A partial payment was made on the 7th. Then another partial payment on the 8th to finish it out.

We hired someone to clean out the gutters at two houses. Both houses are inundated with trees over the roof, so it’s something we need to stay on top of because they back up every 6 months. We could add gutter guards, but just didn’t see the point since we could do it. Now we don’t live there. He is also going to cut trees 10′ back from the roof on one of those houses.

And then the bats. One house had a bat show up last Monday. My property manager didn’t think much of it, so we didn’t do anything (I wasn’t even told about it at that point). Another bat showed up on Saturday. The tenant went for rabies shots and got boosters for her dogs. She then took a bat to get tested, which came back negative. She said she wasn’t comfortable staying there, so she stayed with a friend. We had traps set so bats could get out of the attic, but they couldn’t get back in. The pest people will go back next week to check on things.

We have two houses that will be vacant at the end of this month. We were supposed to have one at the end of June and one at the end of July, but the June one asked for an extension. I let them have it, but I’m not thrilled about my timing now. We won’t be able to truly get to work in there until mid-August, and it’s going to require a lot of work (not hard work, just time consuming). Then for the other one vacating at the end of the month, we don’t intend on renting it again. We’re going to let it sit over the winter and sell it in the spring.

NET WORTH

The way that I update our net worth each month involves overwriting the numbers from last year. So I can easily see that we’ve gained over half a million net worth since July 2024’s update. What’s nice about that is that it’s all appreciation, paying down mortgages, and the stock market with continued savings. We didn’t make any large financial moves that would have adjusted our net worth in one large move like buying a house. I had a conversation with someone about our net worth and goals recently. It would be nice to cross the $5 million threshold, but we’re not actively managing our funds in a way that will cause drastic swings outside of market movement. We crossed $4 million in March 2024.

We’re over $200k from last month’s update. Our credit cards are much higher than last month because of trip purchases and rental work that was unexpected, but needed. Here’s to the last month of summer.

Health Insurance EOBs

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I’m back to discuss this topic. It all comes down to “protect your money.” You need to pay attention to what you’re being billed for before you pay the bill. I’ll just throw out there that I think I had to make a call to correct an Explanation of Benefits (EOB) twice when I had Blue Cross, but it’s nearly every claim with our current insurance.

I had a minor outpatient surgical procedure in March 2025. The pre-op appointments started in January. That’s important because we have a deductible. I don’t trust this company’s calculation of our deductible, so I was paying very close attention to the EOBs for the first few months of the year.

The number of times that I have been sent to collections on a health balance due to their inability to process things correctly is pretty annoying. Every single time, it’s been because of their processes and the lack of insurance communication. Every single time, I’ve been on top of communicating with them to let them know what’s going on with insurance and received assurance that they had everything under control. Then I find out that I’ve been sent to collections.

In this instance, my insurance was really struggling for the first 2-3 months of the year. They had a data breach that screwed up so much of the processing and everything was delayed. I had multiple appointments in January and March (which was also surgery). There were so many insurance delays in processing that the doctors office sent me my statement dated June 16th. In their infinite wisdom, they counted the date of service as the time that I should have paid instead of the time that they received the EOB, and since the date of service was January, I got sent straight to collections. Wonderful.

I can’t stand that they tell me to check their website for help when I’ve already struggled to get their website to do the basic things it should do. But I spent hours calling these people (and the people they tell me to call because they think they can’t help). I finally got through to someone who could help me and understand what my situation was. It turns out I was in “pre-collections,” so not officially reported yet (on my credit; just that they were going to make an attempt to collect, even though I’d love to actually pay them on time). She let me pay the two EOBs worth of a balance and clear the collection record.

There’s no detailed point here. It’s just simply not to trust the doctor/hospital and insurance company to have your best interest in mind. Don’t assume that the paperwork is going to make its way to you. Pay attention to what’s out there and could be pending and a possible bill owed. But even once a bill gets to you, verify that it was paid by insurance correctly and that the amount you owe is accurate. I’ve seen the doctor’s office bill me for the amount unallowable by insurance. I’ve seen a doctor’s office not apply a payment I had made as a “coinsurance” at time of service, even though I had record. I’ve had doctor’s offices require payment up front of $50, but the actual payment owed ended up being $4.

Protect your money. Pay attention.