TRANSCRIPT:
What’s up Internet? My name is Ian Bloom. Welcome to Nerd Finance. I’m your resident financial life planner and huge nerd!
Today we are going to be talking about one of the most spooky times of year…open enrollment. You might have thought that I was going to be talking about Halloween and that’s completely reasonable. But, unlike Halloween, where all the ghouls and ghosts are in your face, open enrollment is a time of year where you can make a lot of mistakes that will last all year and not even know that you made the mistakes until you’re paying for them. So it’s a pretty spooky time of year for a lot of people because there are a lot of decisions to be made and maybe not enough information disseminated about how to make them.
I thought I’d get out ahead of it this year and make some videos to help people with this time. So, over the next four weeks we’re going to cover health insurance, disability insurance, life insurance, and some of the ancillary benefits that you may have available at your employer such as legal insurance and critical illness insurance. Since open enrollment is a little bit of a specter on the horizon what we’re going to try to do over the course of these next four videos is level you up a little bit in order to make it easier for you to deal with some of these decisions.
One of the biggest problems with this time of year is that you have a lot of decisions that you have to make in a very short period of time, maybe without guidance, so you might just click through some of the health insurance options or the disability insurance options that you don’t fully understand because you know that you have to get these things submitted or you’re gonna end up with all the default plans.
The best resource that I can offer you is A Gamer’s Guide to Health Insurance, which is a quick PDF you can download in the description that breaks down all of the health insurance plans and what makes them different in a stat like format. Now, obviously it’s general education. I can’t get specific about your employer’s plans in that document because I don’t know them, but that being said it covers the four main categories and breaks down some of the abbreviations that we use in the industry like PPO, HMO, HDHP, all those types of things to make them a little bit easier to understand.
Finally, if you’re looking for general financial education and open enrollment videos aren’t specifically interesting to you feel free to check out my book in the description. It’s called A Gamer’s Guide to Money: Level 1, and even though this is a little bit of a shameless plug, I don’t blame you if open enrollment isn’t what brought you to this channel. If you were hoping for some more general stuff click through all the other videos on the channel, subscribe to it, or download the book because all of that stuff is going to be more general education.
I hope that this video was interesting to you. I just wanted to make something to preview the series that we’re going to come out with this month because I think that it’s helpful to know what you can look forward to on the channel.
