How should I go about choosing the best HSA for my situation?

Transcripts

Host: How should I go about choosing the best HSA for my situation? Bob Hurley: I have people ask me many times, "How do I pick my Health Savings Account? What are the criteria for that? " You have a lot of flexibility when it comes to picking your Health Savings Account because the trigger for buy and to be able to qualify for a Health Savings Account is your health insurance plan. So I always encourage families, individuals, pick your Health Insurance Plan first, make sure you are finding the company that offers HSA eligible Health Insurance Plans which they will clearly mark them that way.So you shouldn't be concerned about that. They will clearly indicate that they are a Health Savings Account, eligible Health Insurance Plan. So pick the Health Insurance Plan first and then you may want to look and see does the Health Insurance Company have an associated banking relationship with it, many times they do, that maybe an easy way for you to make your selection of a Health Savings Account bank for yourself.Many people don't want their bank account at the bank that they are doing all of the other banking with and so you may want to simply pick up the phone and call your own bank and say, "I now have a Health Savings Account eligible Health Insurance Plan often, referred to as HSA and do you have a bank account there at your bank that is an HSA qualified bank account that I would like to make contributions into it? " Often times, they will have those accounts available at your own local bank and that's a way to choose your banking relationship as well.Some of the things you do want to look at though is the fees associated with some of these accounts. So if you do have the choice between your own bank account and the bank account that's offered through the insurance company, you may want to look at a comparison of those two bank accounts and see how the fees line up. They are going have fees for such things as buying checks. Your bank may not have a fee for buying checks because you already do business with them, that maybe an advantage whereas the insurance company's bank may charge you fees for those checks.Most of the companies, now the HSA Bank Companies have debit cards for you and that's neat because then when you go to pharmacy to get some medicine that's not maybe covered under your Health Insurance Plan, you can actually pull your Health Savings Account debit card out and use that to pay for your medicine, very convenient, very easy to do but some of the banks charge a fee for the use of that ATM card or that debit card and so you want to look at those fees.Some bank accounts are more powerful than others and what I mean by that is because these are savings tools they have interest rates associated with them and so you may want to look at to see what the interest rate is associated with the bank account at your bank versus the bank that has been offered maybe by your Health Insurance Company. So just like you shop for bank accounts in general, whether it be Checking Accounts or Savings Accounts or even frankly mortgage loans, you are typically looking at fees and you are looking at interest rates. You are going to want to do the same thing when you are considering which bank to use for your Health Savings Account.