HSA Drama
Back in 1917 in the town of Midland, MI a bank was founded. Named Chemical Bank likely due to its proximity to the Dow Chemical Corporation and not to be confused with Chemical Bank in New York that later became Chase it grew across most of the state of Michigan and into Ohio.
Until about a year ago when it was purchased by TCF Financial Corporation.
I've had a checking account with Chemical bank since I was about 16 years old if not earlier than that. As I grew up my accounts with them have increased and I have never had an issue.
Now, things are much different.
About two years ago my wife and I were forced by our employer to switch our health care plan. This is something that seems to happen every other year or so. The teachers and steelworkers unions negotiate some kind of switch and since neither my wife nor I are in a union we are forced to just follow along. Looking back, I would guess I am probably on my fifth or sixth insurance provider since starting my career in the public school system.
As I said, one of these switches took place about two years ago and not wanting our premiums to increase an insane amount we decided to pick a high deductible plan. This kept our monthly fees down, but requires us to pay more each time we visit the doctor or have something done. Picking a high deductible plan also gave us the ability to sign up for an HSA (Health Savings Account).
Not to be confused with a Flex Spending account which doesn't roll over from year to year, the money in an HSA stays with you for as long as you are alive. It can only be used on health related expenses unless you want to pay a penalty, but you do earn a small percentage of interest on the money you hold in there. Additionally, you can invest a portion of your HSA and past a certain age (63 maybe?) you can access the funds with little to no penalty I think.
Our school district offered an HSA through their partner American Fidelity. We opted to set ours up with Chemical Bank instead. American Fidelity is a wholly corrupt company that went out of their way to make my battle with cancer as difficult as possible. They didn't fulfill the terms of my insurance and eventually violated my HIPPA rights. That's a whole different story though...
I setup some bi-monthly deposits into our Chemical Bank HSA through our business office. Instead of my wife and I both getting insurance through the school district, she is the primary subscriber. I am under her subscription and somehow that saves the district money, so they pay me a cash-in-lieu of payment each year for saving them that money. It was pretty much a no-brainer to start having them deposit that money into our HSA too.
So Chemical Bank gets bought by TCF and we have fairly no problems on the HSA side of things. They send us a new debit card and things are pretty okay. We did have some issues with our other accounts, but that is another story too!
Just recently, we find out that TCF bank got bought by Huntington Bank. We figure we are going to have to go through the whole process again.
Not so fast...
Apparently Huntington doesn't have an HSA program and our account is getting moved to something called Optum. My parents meanwhile are wholly annoyed by the whole "bank roulette" thing and they have decided to move all of their funds to a local credit union. Being an avid crypto holder, I can't say I blame them for that.
Meanwhile, I am waiting for info from this Optum place about our HSA. To be fair, Optum appears to be one of the four leading HSA providers in the country and it also appears that we will have some increased investment opportunities with our Optum HSA.
I guess I never realized that you can invest a portion of your HSA into mutual funds and things like that to earn you a higher return on your investment. I'm all about that passive income, so I will likely be looking into this a bit closer once we get fully migrated.
Anyone else been through something like this? With all of these banks merging and dissolving, it is easy to see why the masses are yearning for an alternative. Something that allows them to actually control their money and not be at the whimsy of corporate America.
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