HSA in Ontario Canada

[coco1106]

Hi,
We have a HSA with fidelity at the moment I think it has about 30K ?? we contribute each month to the fund.
Does any one know what we can do with HSA when we move to Canada, is it treated like IRA..Hope we can leave all our accounts with Fidelity ?? still not sure if this is "allowed" for non us residents.
 ( Raymond James looks like a brokerage firm who has us/cdn licence for us retirement funds for non residents) 

I know we can longer contribute to the HSA, Does CRA treat this like a retirement acct? or a trust ???
thanks for any  input on HSA for non us residents.

[Le Poisson]

Is an HSA an unsheltered high interest savings account? If so, many banks here offer them. If it is like an IRA, then it will be the equivalent of a TFSA (Tax Free Savings Account), and many banks offer them, but most Mustachians prefer to get one through questrade.com or Tangerine.ca.

[coco1106]

 

  hi,

HSA is a health saving account.......allowed to contribute up to $6000 towards the cost of your health care, if you dont use it you can roll it over to the next yr, we have 30k in ours, it can only be used for specified medical procedures , if you dont use any of it you can withdraw the funds when you are 65 just like a IRA, but I think people  save the money for health care when they are older to supplement medicare.

Since we are moving to canada and will have OHIP, I am not sure what to do with this money, if we could use it for dental, vision, prescription drugs that would be great, but I am not sure if this is allowed, also not sure if CRS treats this like a IRA ??? Hoping the cross boarder accountant will be able to help.

[jackies]

Friends of mine were in a similar situation. 
I don't think that their balance was quite as high, but they are still using it for health costs.
You won't be covered for provincial health care for the first 3 months, and if either of you need to apply for residency then you won't be covered for a while after that.  They used part of their HSA to cover blue cross type policies for that time frame.
They do not have supplementary coverage through work, so they are still using the HSA for dentist bills, glasses and prescriptions.
Again- they didn't have nearly as high a balance but are planning to work through it as needed for those expenses.

[coco1106]

  Jackies,

thank you for the information............so were you friends able to purchase their visitors to canada   insurance using HSA ( I was told we have to wait 3 months before our OHIP is issued, we have our original red and white plastic cards from 25 yrs ago, they said we are in the system but it needs to be activated )

That is great we can use HSA for dental etc, I had no idea we were able to do that, thank you for that input.
I think we about 40k ish in there , I did not realize we had that much !!

We are both dual citizens USA/CND

[coco1106]

  We will not have supplement insurance when we move, the plans I looked at were about $200cdn for both of us, being able to use HSA to pay for any dental. drugs would be great ...........may I ask you Jackie if they just use their HSA visa card, then the funds came out of the account, of course they would receive a tax slip since they used the HSA come tax time.

[jackies]

Hi

I believe that they bought travel coverage (especially for him, since she's a Canadian citizen and would be covered in 3 months, while he isn't eligible for quite a while).
I'm not sure how they paid for the dental coverage... Honestly, now that I think about it, I think that he went back to visit family and scheduled some major dental appointments for the visit back to the US.  (They were procedures that they already knew were coming).  I'm not sure if that drained the account or if they are going to be using it as an ongoing source for covering eye/dentist and prescriptions now that they aren't going back and forth.

[coco1106]

  Thank you Jackie,
that is a great idea if they can go back to USA for major dental work.

We will get the 3 month coverage in Ontario from CAA, $ 750 for 3 months for both of us until we get OHIP.