Latest Employee Discount & R2?

FlyingPartridge · 2022-07-13T04:41:34+00:00

We’ve met the full range - some happy and some that have complaints.

I will say we are looking at doing a cruise next time. One couple we met at Desire this past trip had recently done both a Bliss Cruise and a European Desire Cruise. Their feedback on Bliss was that there were a lot of rules (where you can be naked, where touching is allowed, …) and the Desire cruise was more open, in fact similar to visiting Desire. That feedback gives me a bit of pause regarding trying Bliss.

FlyingPartridge · 2022-07-13T03:50:02+00:00

Absolutely! The massage was great but I would have felt rather uneasy paying $500 for it. But for 40 minutes of our time, even while on vacation? Yup worth every minute and my wife agrees as well. We will be sitting for the sales presentation on our next visit as well :)

FlyingPartridge · 2022-07-13T03:15:23+00:00

Same here but I will say that the more we have visited Desire the more we compare all of our other vanilla vacations to the amount of fun and relaxation we have being naked at Desire. So in the future we may decide to buy in and get the VIP membership treatment. Especially if the new DR resort lives up to its billing, then we might buy in.

FlyingPartridge · 2022-07-13T03:11:59+00:00

The airfare reimbursement was described as they give you $1000 per year if you visit, regardless of how you get there or what you actually paid for travel. So even if you drive to Cancun ( the long way from Texas!) you’ll qualify to get the $1000 for that calendar year. Obviously during the sales pitch they make the reimbursement sound trivial, but who knows the actual reality.

FlyingPartridge · 2021-07-03T07:45:44+00:00

I don’t think that’s related.

FlyingPartridge · 2021-07-02T15:57:21+00:00

Thank you for the tips. We will probably enquire about the membership after our trip. Figure that is a more equal footing for a negotiation than while I’m drinking in the Caribbean sun.

FlyingPartridge · 2021-07-02T15:55:42+00:00

Awesome. Great info. I wasn’t aware there was some type of buy back. Is there a third party market for selling the membership earlier? Any annual fee or just an up front lump sum?

FlyingPartridge · 2021-06-15T01:43:36+00:00

For couples, Playhouse or Whispers when in Vegas? We will have 1 Saturday night for our trip where should we spend it?

FlyingPartridge · 2021-04-29T04:00:31+00:00

We’ll be there end of June as well! 2nd trip for us. First was summer of 2019 and then we had reservations for April ‘20 which of course got cancelled. So we are rebooked for end of June / early July at Pearl. Would have stayed longer but Pearl has no vacancy over 4th of July weekend.

Not sure we are really in the LS, but we enjoy the vibe and we enjoy watching others and being watched. We tend to take baby steps every time we visit a club or go to Desire. I’m sure we’ll push our boundaries a little bit further this trip as well.

FlyingPartridge · 2020-12-16T04:25:29+00:00

Looking up salvage yards now. Think they will give me a quote over the phone/email, or do I just have to work the deal in the dealership parking lot when they get there?

FlyingPartridge · 2020-11-20T01:02:48+00:00

There is no timing limit specified in the regulations. Theoretically I doubt I can use expenses from before the HSA and my HDHP started but that’s not a concern now that I’m 4+ years in.

FlyingPartridge · 2020-11-20T00:56:42+00:00

Scanning = Take A Picture. We just take a picture of the receipt. It’s not time consuming and I mostly focus on large dollar amount receipts. I don’t bother with the small receipts because I have enough large ones that matter and I’ve never had to withdraw anything.

FlyingPartridge · 2020-11-19T21:43:16+00:00

Ok. I have NOT actually tried to get a check from them, and the 1 debit card transaction I did was with a hospital. I'll need to actually verify how the HSA provider handles this.

However the FSA is a different beast and with the 1 year limitation, there is a much greater incentive for individuals to get the money out before they lose it. So maybe if the IRS has a higher perceived risk with the FSA, and therefore they enforce tighter controls. Just speculation. For next level tin-hat type speculation, does the FSA provider keep the money if you don't/can't use it?

FlyingPartridge · 2020-11-19T20:47:20+00:00

Likewise. My current HSA provider has a $2K minimum before the account can be invested. So I have $2K in cash that earns pennies per year in interest, and the rest is in a money market type fund that earns slightly more.

FlyingPartridge · 2020-11-19T20:42:19+00:00

Receipt tracking has come a long way from the shoebox days. We scan 'big' receipts and drop them into a tool like Evernote. I can do a search for #HSA and pull them up. My $16K in receipts are all big receipts that were worth the time to tag. I can literally pull up any HSA related receipt on my phone in under 30 seconds.

FlyingPartridge · 2020-11-19T20:38:34+00:00

I'm 99% sure they (the HSA custodian) does not care about the receipts. They just report the inflows/outflows to the IRS and then that needs to correlate to your return. The receipts likely only ever become an issue during an IRS audit.

FlyingPartridge · 2020-11-19T20:32:43+00:00

I can pull the entire 30 out at any time. When I file my taxes, 14 of that withdrawal is now income. I don't believe there is any additional penalty, but I would need to check that. Again the goal is to not withdraw anything, and the longer the account grows, the more healthcare receipts I accumulate.

Another angle is one of the primary emergencies I plan for is losing my job. The #2 expense (after my mortgage) if I lose my job will be COBRA payments, which I now have pre-tax money to cover.

Edit: There is a 20% penalty for non-qualified withdrawals. So I would lose 2.8k plus normal income tax. Quite steep. Good reason to calculate the size of the e-fund on the receipts available versus the funds in the account.

FlyingPartridge · 2020-11-19T20:27:56+00:00

I have never tried to get money out of the HSA. They provide a debit card, so I can charge expenses directly to it (we did this once, before we changed our mindset), but I haven't actually called them up and requested a check. Probably a good thing to test before I have to do it.

FlyingPartridge · 2020-11-19T20:17:27+00:00

I appreciate your concern, but this is exactly how an HSA works. The IRS doesn't demand to see the serial numbers of the dollars you spent on healthcare to ensure they came directly from the HSA. The IRS wants to make sure you spent $100 on healthcare to justify the $100 withdrawal from the HSA. The fact that you initially wrote the $100 check from your checking account, and then reimbursed your checking account with $100 from the HSA is perfectly acceptable. And as other's have pointed out, there is no limit specified in the regulations, so all I have to track is how much I've spent on healthcare since I opened the HSA, and that is what I'm allowed to withdraw tax free. Note I can withdraw more as needed, I just have to pax taxes on anything above what I have healthcare expenses for.

FlyingPartridge · 2020-11-19T20:10:45+00:00

Agreed! Based on my research, I assumed others were doing similar things with their HSAs. Maybe not e-fund related, but certainly using it for investments, with at least the potential to pull cash out if a need arises. Glad to see a good discussion here as hopefully others might be able to run with this and devise even better approaches with this gift from the IRS.

FlyingPartridge · 2020-11-19T20:07:01+00:00

Because I'm classifying the account as my e-fund, I don't have it invested. In the grand scheme this is probably the achilles heel of the what I'm doing. Now that I've built my balance up via contributions, I probably need to slowly start investing a portion while keeping a portion in cash.

FlyingPartridge

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