Lively (W17) is hiring across a number of roles including full stack engineering, product management, user acquisition lead, business development. If you want to be a part of changing how people save for and pay for future medical expenses, take a look. More details here: http://livelyme.com/careers/
Good question. That is functionality that we will be coming out with. We have some interesting ideas of making that experience more seamless than what is currently provided but are a couple months away from releasing that.
So long as you have established your HSA prior to incurring the expense, you would be able to reimburse yourself later for that expense. So for example, if you were to establish your HSA tomorrow and funded it with $1 and then the very next day you got sick or injured, you could pay for those services out-of-pocket and then reimburse yourself with your HSA dollars whenever you had enough money in it at some point in the future.
We haven't launched our investment capabilities yet. That will come at the end of Q2. For individuals, there is no fee for just having a Lively HSA account.
For 2017, the individual limit is $3,400 and for families it is $6,750. You are right that HSA accountholders are limited to these amounts as of today.
Yes absolutely. This is something that is on our roadmap. generally speaking, certain powerful features of the HSA (as you pointed out) are not well understood by people. We want to build product to pull out the best features and highlight them. This is a great thought. Keep them coming!
We think individuals who have HSAs should be able to save their money without incurring a monthly fee. So many of our own family and friends have told us about how they have a small balance in their HSA account but are getting charged $3, $4, $5, etc. a month just for having that account. We don’t think that’s right so we won’t charge individuals for their basic HSA. Once we have investments up at the end of Q2 and an individual chooses to invest, we’ll charge a nominal flat monthly fee for that.
Since the most people get their HSA through their employer, we’ve built our product in a way that employers can sign up and administer an HSA easily. Things like automatic payroll sync, on boarding in under 10 minutes, viewing the status of where employees are in the process, etc. are all things to reduce the burden of administering HSAs that employers currently experience. For employers who have greater than 10 enrolled employees, we charge $4/month/employee.
And regarding employers, employee contributions to an HSA through an employer's payroll are not subject to FICA taxes (social security & medicare) so when employees contribute to their HSA, the employer saves 7.65% since those contributions are not subject to FICA.
To your question about interest rates, yes we have them available on our website in the Individuals and Families page (in the middle under the white box): https://livelyme.com/individuals-and-families/.
Thanks for your thoughts! You are correct in that investment options are not available right now. We will be launching investment capabilities by the end of Q2.
We are focused on allowing our users to get the most out of their HSA. While we have released our minimal functionality for the time being, we will be adding products and services on top of this to make the process of spending your HSA dollars much more streamlined.
We have focused on streamlining the onboarding and administrative process for employers and attempted to remove the clunkiness we have seen elsewhere. It is definitely an ongoing project, but appreciate your thoughts and welcome any feedback as to how to improve the process and product!
So long as you have a high deductible health plan, you can sign-up for an HSA, but there are some tax deductible rules that would apply. We have an FAQ in our Learning Center. The question is "Are employer contributions tax-deductible?".
We have tried to answer these questions and many more on our Learning Center. Feel free to check it out here: https://livelyme.com/hsa-faqs/
WRT investments, we will be launching those capabilities by the end of Q2. Stay tuned and feel free to drop us a note anytime about what you would be most interested in when it comes to investment capabilities.
1. Yes we absolutely do. You can sign-up as an individual. When you get to the sign-up screen, just click on the Individual Account.
2. We are going to be launching investment capabilities at the end of Q2. When we do this, you will have access to invest in low cost mutual funds, ETFs, but also straight stocks/bonds, etc. It will be a self-directed option.
3. Yes you can rollover! But be sure to ask your provider if there is a fee. We have found that often times HSA providers charge a nominal rollover/transfer fee. They vary so be sure to ask. Today, just send us an email to [email protected] and we can walk you through that process. We just need some information from you, will fill out a form, send it to you for electronic signature, and we take care of the rest. We have plans to completely automate this process, but we haven't yet released that functionality. Stay tuned!
I can't even tell you how "annoyed" we were when we got wind of this. It really is important to us to not charge individuals for the basic HSA. We will be coming out with investment capabilities at the end of Q2. Stay tuned for that. And for full transparency, since that is a premium feature, we will charge individuals for that ability, however our fees for that will be in-line with how the current industry prices it. If you don't want investment capabilities, your HSA is 100% free with us.
Yes it is true! When we began looking into this over a year ago, we discovered how powerful of a utility the HSA can be. The rule is that your HSA dollars can be invested and earn interest completely tax free, so long as when you take your money out, it is used on qualified medical expenses. Assuming you use the money on qualified medical expenses, you can use that money tomorrow, next year, or 30 years from now. There is a lot more flexibility in that context. Worst case, you can invest and let your HSA dollars grow and when you retire (age 65 with the HSA), use the money for non-qualified expenses and just pay ordinary income taxes at that time - similar to the 401k.
We will be launching our investment capabilities at the end of Q2 so stay tuned for that.
With regards to what are we doing to make it easier:
1. We have designed our user experience to not need paperwork to get up and running. You (as the employer) and your employees can sign up in minutes - all online.
2. We have a Learning Center designed to help both employers and individuals about best practices, listed qualified medical expenses
3. Electronic receipt upload and categorization in case of an audit
4. For employers, we are automated with 9 different payroll companies taking the administrative burden off of the employer and onto us!
Those are just a few things, but we will be coming out with many more features that will help you as you grow!
Thanks for your comment. We wanted to give our users the ability to opt-into receiving information about HSA and other related topics as we move forward without necessarily signing up on day 1 (in case they are not ready to do so).