How to get the most out of your benefits
If you’re a full-time employee in the U.S., along with your salary or hourly wages, your employer likely provides a suite of benefits that are part of your total compensation package.
It’s also likely that you pay for some or all of your insurance coverage through this system, depending on what’s available to you. But how much do you actually use those benefits throughout the year, and is the juice worth the proverbial squeeze?
Here are a few tips to help you plan to get the most out of your benefits in 2023.
1. Reflect on your benefits usage in the past year
The best way to get started is to take stock of how you’re feeling about your benefits usage to date. To do this, jot down the answers to three questions:
1. Which benefits are you paying for?
2. Which do you wish you were contributing more or less to?
3. How well do your benefits align with your goals?
If you’re not sure where to begin, consider the types of your benefits you have access to. This typically includes…
Medical insurance, including vision and dental.
Life insurance.
Short-term and long-term disability insurance.
Retirement, which may include a match with or without a vesting schedule.
As you think back on your usage and satisfaction with your current coverage, identify how your needs and wants may be different in the year ahead.
For example, if you’ve got a big medical procedure on the calendar, your spending may look very different than it did last year.
Pro tip: Log into your account on your health insurance provider’s website to review your claims and spending from the past year. This information can help you compare your impression of how your year in medical spending went with how well your insurance policy actually met your needs.
2. Identify your goals for next year
Once you’ve taken stock of how the past year went, you’re primed to look ahead. To make goals that stick, create one goal for each of these three categories:
Health, which may mean finding a primary care provider or keeping up with ongoing physical therapy
Finances, including paying down debt, saving toward a goal, and saving for retirement
Plans, like taking time off to visit friends or family, working toward a promotion, or getting ready to make a big change
Your goals don’t have to be wildly ambitious; in fact, it’s better to pick goals that don’t seem far from reach.
For example, rather than arbitrarily deciding that you want to save half of your net income in the year ahead, take a look at what you saved last year and consider what might be a reasonable increase to that number.
Once you know what you want to do, you’re ready to take a break for a tall glass of water and a nice stretch. Ah, doesn’t that feel good?
3. Make a plan to get more out of your benefits
Now that you know what you want, it’s time to make a plan that you’ll actually follow. (A challenge for us all!)
To keep things simple, start with one of the goals you identified for yourself, whether financial, health-related, or about something else entirely.
Step 1: Pick one of your goals for the year ahead.
Step 2: Research what’s available to you within your benefits plans.
Step 3: Identify what specific steps you’ll take to get to that goal.
Step 4: Set a date and time for completing your first incremental step toward this goal.
Step 5: Do it!
To help you put this into action, let’s look at a real example. Say your goal is to take advantage of all the preventive care opportunities included in your medical insurance policies in the year ahead.
Through researching your plans, you may find that your policy covers one annual checkup with your primary care provider.
Now that you know what’s available to you, you can use the provider finder tool on your insurance company’s website to find a physician in your network and contact them to make an appointment.
ALEX is here to help you stay on top of your benefits
It’s easy enough to say you’ll hold yourself accountable to your goals, but it’s also easy to say you’ll only have one cold seltzer on a hot afternoon.
To help you stay on track to meet your goals, ALEX will send you periodic reminders to schedule preventive care appointments, check in about your mental health, and give you the nudge you need to up your retirement account contribution (whenever you’re ready).
Until then, remember that the trick to getting more out of your benefits is to know what’s available to you, to know what you want, and to make a plan to get there.
ALEX
Did you know that “benefit” comes from the Latin phrase bene facere meaning “do good”? As in, it would do everyone some good to sign up for preventive care!