There are entries in the software for Health Savings Account contributions.
These entries are located below the entries for health insurance.
Those entries are used in the tax calculations and financial projections.
Whether the values flow to the child support calculation varies by state. A few states count HSA contributions as a deduction. Most don’t.
With respect to the financial affidavit, HSA contributions will carry to your state’s financial affidavit only if there is a specific line for HSA contributions. This is very rarely the case. So in most states the HSA contribution will not carry to the financial affidavit.
The reason that HSA contributions tend not to carry — either for child support or the financial affidavit — is that an HSA contribution is considered by the state to be merely a transfer of money from one pocket to another. It is merely a transfer of money from your bank account to your HSA account. So it is not a current expense.
If you want to show the HSA contribution on a financial affidavit, you can override directly on the financial affidavit for that purpose.
With respect to the software’s treatment for financial projections, eventually, it does not make a difference to the long term picture when the money is spent for medical expenses. Whether it is spent now or five years from now, for purposes of the long term picture, it is still spent.
Therefore, to keep things simple, our approach to Health Savings Account and Flexible Spending Accounts for financial purposes is as follows:
1. When the contribution is made, we treat it as if it were spent in that year.
2. When the actual expenditure out of the HSA is made, later, we do not treat it as an expenditure at the later point, having accounted for it when the contribution into the account was made.
3. We do not consider the asset value of the amount in the account, for a similar reason.
To summarize, for financial purposes, we treat Health Savings Account and Flexible Spending Account contributions as if they are current expenses. This is the essential nature of the transaction. All that is happening after that is a delay with respect to when the medical or other expense is actually paid.