The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Taxes => Topic started by: Sibley on August 02, 2018, 08:27:01 AM
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I have 3 HSA accounts. This is too complicated. I want to get them down to 1.
Wageworks (have to move soon due to fees, small dollars)
BenefitWallet (it's fine, big dollars)
Optum (new employer account, currently 0)
Ideally, I want to combine the Wageworks and BenefitWallet into the Optum account. However, I don't want to pay fees, and it looks like a direct transfer (which avoids the 1 rollover per year rule) would have fees.
Can I rollover Wageworks into BenefitWallet, then BenefitWallet into Optum without running afoul of the year rule? Doing it this way, each account would have 1 rollover in.
Current planned technique: https://thefinancebuff.com/how-to-rollover-an-hsa-on-your-own-and-avoid-trustee-transfer-fee.html
IRS pub: https://www.irs.gov/publications/p969#en_US_2017_publink1000204068
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I'm pretty sure it's not a per account thing, I think it's 1 per year across all accounts. I couldn't find a source, but here's one about the similar rule for IRAs: http://www.investmentnews.com/article/20140316/REG/303169996/a-warning-on-multiple-ira-rollovers
Remember that it's 1 per 12 month period, not per calendar year.
Looks like Wageworks charges $16 (https://www.wageworks.com/media/567624/hsa-implementation.pdf), but according to the BenefitWallet transfer form (https://mybenefitwallet.com/CMS/docs/default/Trustee_Transfer_IN.pdf) it looks like maybe they don't. Worth Double checking, but if that's the case you could make a trustee-to-trustee transfer of the BenefitWallet HSA to Optum and do a rollover for the Wageworks HSA to Optum.
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Ok, thanks. I'll look into the direct transfers more, see if I can get at least one done without fees.
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Update: in process. Doing direct transfer from wageworks to Optum, and getting a check from BenefitWallet to send to Optum.
In case anyone's curious, Optum's customer service is 24/7 and seems generally decent. Wageworks is terrible overall, and haven't tried to talk to BenefitWallet but their website is decent.