Married? Combine health insurance with your spouse.
It may be cheaper for married couples to share a family plan instead of maintaining two separate health insurance plans, Hamm writes.
This April 2011 file photo shows Prince William and Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, walking down the aisle at Westminster Abbey following their marriage in central London. Married couples may save money on health insurance by combining plans, Hamm writes.
Richard Pohle/AP/File
When Sarah and I graduated from college, we were both lucky enough to find jobs almost immediately. Since we weren鈥檛 married yet, we signed up for health insurance separately, with each of us getting policies.
A year later, we were married. We largely kept our finances separate at that point.
Two years later, our first child arrived, and with that child鈥檚 arrival, we began to look seriously at combining our financial situations.
What we discovered pretty quickly is that it would have been far less expensive for us to put me on her health insurance than it was for us to maintain separate plans. In fact, her family plan was cheaper than the annual cost of just the two of us insuring separately.
It seems like a simple move, but when people switch jobs and life situations, things like these can easily be overlooked.
If you鈥檝e overlooked this option before, don鈥檛 let it happen again. It鈥檚 actually quite easy to find out how much you might save by combining insurance.
贵颈谤蝉迟,听get a quote from the insurance provider at each partner鈥檚 workplace.聽Get quotes for both yourself as an individual and for both of you (or the entire family if you鈥檙e covering children, too). Try hard to make the quotes as equal as possible if you have different health care options in each workplace.
Most of the time, plans won鈥檛 be exactly equal, so聽sit down and determine which plan offers you the best bargain.聽Consider both your normal health and disastrous situations. Also, focus not on the total cost of each plan, but how much it鈥檚 affecting your take-home pay.
In my experience, one plan usually shows up as the clear winner.聽Enroll both of you in the better plan as soon as you can.
When you鈥檙e enrolled in the good plan,聽don鈥檛 forget to unsubscribe from the other plan in the other workplace.聽You may have to work around open enrollment windows to do this.
What if the plans are very similar?聽Choose the plan through the employment situation that is more stable.Which job is likely to last the longest? Which one has offered their plan for the longest without significant change? Stick with stability with everything else being equal.
This task isn鈥檛 as complicated as it might sound, and it can certainly save you some significant money.
This post is part of a yearlong series called 鈥�365 Ways to Live Cheap (Revisited),鈥� in which I鈥檓 revisiting the entries from my book 鈥�365 Ways to Live Cheap,鈥� which is available聽at Amazon聽and at bookstores everywhere.聽