Join our participants as they reduce debt and increase savings with the help of Summit financial coaches.
Emily and Ginger's Journey:
Open enrollment and we're not done gardening yet!
Autumn brings the changing colors, the first snowfalls, and, in many workplaces, open enrollment season! Our coach helped us to take a closer look at some of the flex spending accounts available through our employers and make some tweaks to our plans to maximize our benefits. The biggest change for us was to enroll in the dependent-care flex spending account for the first time. Somehow, we never did this even though we've been paying for daycare for a few years now. The max amount you can use through this program is $5,000, so it didn't seem worth it to us because that is unfortunately a small fraction of our annual bill as a result of having two kids in daycare full-time. However, Jamie helped us understand that the real benefit to doing this is the tax savings when we file next year, because we’ll have $5,000 less in income that we’ll need to pay taxes on. If you haven't checked before, you can Google the tax brackets to see how much savings you can have based on your income. It adds up a lot more than we would have guessed!
Even with some snow on the ground, our garden is still going strong. We are continuing to harvest some cold-loving plants like kale, Brussels sprouts and carrots. And, today we planted garlic! Emily and her parents put 100 cloves of garlic in the ground in our shared community garden plot. Garlic needs to sit over-winter like other bulbs, so it will be ready to harvest next summer and should keep both of our families stocked with garlic for the year to come. Yum!