Artificially Intelligent with Sam Maule and Maia Bittner

Cracking the Code on Health Savings with Matt Quinn's Expertise

• Sam Maule, Maia Bittner, Rachel Morrissey

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Unlock the secrets of financial health with a deeper dive into the world of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) as we sit down with Matt Quinn, the savvy mind behind Harvest.  Matt illuminates the intricate dance of savings, investments, and tax advantages that HSAs offer, especially post Affordable Care Act.  Experience our candid chat as we, your hosts Sam and Maia, share our own HSA stories, reflecting on the smart moves and the occasional stumbles we've encountered in our journey through the healthcare cost maze.

Think managing healthcare costs is a high-wire act? You're not alone. This episode peels back the layers of HSA contribution limits, the quirky 'birthday rule' for dependents, and the savvy strategy of catch-up contributions for the 55-and-over crowd. We even touch on the recent tax return day deadline extension for HSA contributions, offering insights that could change the way you think about your next doctor's visit. Whether it's navigating the system for a family or making the most of your individual plan, we've got the lowdown on how to keep your finances as fit as your health.

But it's not all about the numbers—we're also tackling the ethical tightrope of personal finance data. How do you maximize your financial potential without succumbing to the lure of unnecessary spending? We delve into the finder's fees for spotting eligible expenses and wrestle with the tension between data privacy and value extraction. Plus, we explore how fintech startups are creatively addressing cash flow issues to give you a leg up in today's economy. Tune in and join our conversation as we explore the labyrinth of healthcare savings—it's a journey well worth the listen.

Hosts: Sam Maule & Maia Bittner


Sam Maule:

This is Essential Audio. Hey everybody, welcome to Artificially Intelligent podcast brought to you by Money 2020. I'm your host, sam.

Maia Bittner:

And I'm Maya Bittner. Today we are talking about HSAs, the tax savings and investment and health insurance option. We've got a real expert here with us, matt Quinn, who is the founder and CEO of a pretty new startup called Harvest. Matt, thanks for coming on today.

Matt Quinn:

Thanks for having me, Beth.

Maia Bittner:

Yeah, so excited to jump in. I hear about HSAs being the best investment choice all the time. I feel like it's the most frequent thing I see on Twitter. People are raving about it. They say it's triple tax advantage. Matt, can you give us a high-level overview of HSAs? To start out?

Matt Quinn:

Sure High level kind of cliff notes on HSAs are post Affordable Care Act. We said as a country that you could get a health care plan with a high deductible and to incentivize people to do that we would give them a savings account as an asset. There's a limit on how much money can go into that savings account, but the money typically goes in untaxed from your employer and then also from you. If you want to top up your contributions, it will grow inside of that account untaxed and then if you need to take it out for medical purposes, you can pull that out untaxed. So it actually kind of accidentally created what is the most tax advantage in theory investment account kind of in the history of America, and it's a bit of a funny one. The numbers involved can be such that it's like annoyingly small to deal with. But if you are willing to go through the administrative pain of dealing with that, you can quite literally create like a million dollar asset that's effectively tax free when you retire.

Maia Bittner:

Well, and so this is new as of the Affordable Care Act.

Matt Quinn:

Just after. So I think 2011 was like the main cementing of when HSAs came around and these high deductible plans came. But the idea was hey, instead of spending a whole bunch of money on health insurance, why don't we? It's cheaper for an employer, but why don't we just try and give the like health accountability to the customer or to the patient? And so if you have a high deductible plan with HSA, you are incentivized to do two things One, when you need help, to try and find the cheapest option possible inside your healthcare network, because otherwise you're paying out of your little asset savings spot. And two, to just try and take the best care of your health possible, such that, like, your actual healthcare costs will be lower and you can save more money in this way.

Maia Bittner:

Yeah, so the incentives are kind of, yeah, like align in a way that we don't often see with healthcare.

Matt Quinn:

Yeah, I mean, on the flip side, it's probably the cheapest way your employer can offer healthcare as well. So that is incentivized to them. And I think if there are certain situations, if you have, you know, if you, if you, if you're looking for health care and you start and you have a chronic illness, then a lot of times if you're not, if you're managing that with medication and repetitive health care, you're seeing health care professionals regularly, then it typically won't work out. Or if you have, let's say, I know out here you have like a whole bunch of kids who want to do physicals every single year and you you think you know one of them has asthma, a couple things like that, then uh, you will just burn through your deduct, your deductible and your hsa account pretty quickly. But for if you can start young enough and you are like health conscious and you pick you're kind of picky about your food, maybe a bit more on the like quantified health or like biohackery side it's a. It's a real like no brainer golden ticket kind of plan to take forwards.

Sam Maule:

Yeah, it's one of those things, Maya. It makes me laugh. Right, Because, as someone in their fifties now, I'm constantly looking at, okay, what's life like in retirement? Right, Because now the clock's ticking, even though it's been ticking the whole time, but now you're like, oh my God, the clock is ticking. So when I started reading about HSAs, I read an estimate from Fidelity. It made me smile. It said a single person aged 65 in 2023 can expect to spend $157,500 on healthcare in retirement. Sam, are you ready? Oh my God, oh my God. We talked about raising kids and how expensive it is On the flip side of it retirement. Good Lord.

Maia Bittner:

Well, and the HSA. So I mean everything Matt is saying sounds really cool, but if this has been around for only 13 years, then it's all a little bit theoretical, right, like nobody has actually created a million-dollar HSA to then use in retirement, right, because just not enough time has passed. And with the limits on contributions and investment returns, is there any risk that this kind of doesn't pan out the way that people think it will?

Matt Quinn:

There's a theoretical risk for sure that I'm aware of, the federal government is really greedy, and at the drop of a hat, the right lobbyists come in and will pass a tax bill that says, no, we're not doing this anymore and you need to empty out your accounts and you'll pay whatever fees. Um, I think that actually it's a it's like not a massive benefit of what we're trying to achieve, but again, like if you're putting so the max. Currently, this year, the contribution to your hsa will be, uh, four thousand one hundred and fifty dollars is the limit, right, it's kind of, if you're a high income earner, it's kind of an an amount of money that is just annoying to account for in certain ways, and so one of the things that I am liking about what we're doing at Harvest is if the law is changing or is going to change. We'll let you know. Okay, the law has changed. Fidelity probably will send you one email you get lost on.

Matt Quinn:

Or Health Equity, which is the main HSA fund manager as well, is like not the best experience, and we really want to try and help people protect that asset. Going forwards the money out of your HSA pre 65, pre retirement age and not for medical expenses, you pay income tax on it, plus you pay a 20% penalty. So one of the things that we're really bullish on is trying to track every. I don't want to get too into the weeds because we haven't really gotten there yet, but we try and track every out of pocket medical expense. And if the law was to change and they said, okay, you need to cash out all your medical expenses today, we would hopefully put our users in a position where they can push a button and are mostly protected from the changing of the law going forward. I would generally think that the industry at large would lobby against the federal government doing that, because healthcare is wildly expensive for anybody that touches it and this is again like the cheapest the cheapest plan they can offer.

Sam Maule:

And that contribution limit. You were talking about that roughly about four thousand dollars. That's for an individual right, because for a family it goes up to about eight.

Matt Quinn:

Yeah, it doubles, so yeah, so this year is four thousand one hundred and fifty for an individual. No-transcript.

Maia Bittner:

We actually. So we just got and this is slightly inspired by you, matt, but also all of the recommendations I see on Twitter so we just got an HSA well, not me exactly. So Dave got an HSA and has our daughter on it so that we can have the family limit and that she's covered under that and that's been so. We've set that up. It's been a little bit cumbersome. So far, our daughter is actually well, she's covered, so there's overlap. So she's covered on both my health insurance and his health insurance now and I learned that, so it's been tricky.

Maia Bittner:

So our pediatrician's office said that our health insurance was rejecting her most recent appointments and I said, well, she's still covered under my insurance and apparently the high deductible plan is now the primary insurance and needs to be billed first. And I said, oh, I don't know. Like why are we making that primary? Let's make mine primary. But just a weird annoying thing with health insurance apparently the primary insurance must be Dave's because Dave's birthday happens earlier in the year. Matt, you're acting like you already knew. This Happens earlier in the year than mine does and that is what decides your primary insurance.

Matt Quinn:

This birthday rule is like this niche rule. That's not. I don't think it's legally binding, but most of the insurance companies respect this rule. My understanding and I'm probably getting it slightly wrong is that this was written into the Affordable Care Act. You might tell from accident, right?

Matt Quinn:

My wife and I did not grow up here and are trying to navigate the US healthcare system. We said, okay, well, I'm most likely to lose or leave my job or put the baby on your healthcare plan. And then her insurance started denying bills. And bills were coming through for everything from the birth of the child, right, there was an emergency C-section and we stayed in hospital for eight days and, like, the numbers on these bills were so anxiety inducing. And we've managed. We've kept talking to people at both health care plans and none of them could explain it. And then we managed to find like one person knew of this birthday rule. So whoever's birthday comes, if you both have health care, whoever's birthday comes first in the year covers the child for the first year of life, including the birth experience is my understanding of that rule.

Maia Bittner:

And yeah, we yeah, this is the first I heard of it.

Sam Maule:

It sounds crazy to me we do everything we can to protect this industry. To make it like do you speak latin? Wait a minute. What version of latin do you speak?

Matt Quinn:

it oddly looks like my second child now isn't like isn't mixed up in the birthday rule, like all the bills are coming through for my wife's name, not on my name. So I did switch from one health care provider to a different health care provider in that period of time, which I wonder if they don't respect the rule or whatever but oh, different, different way yeah yeah, and a thing I learned this year when I was looking at these that I wish I would have known this before.

Sam Maule:

There is also catch up contributions that can be done when you're over 55. I represent the over 55 crowd, so here for you, but it made me laugh because it's only like a thousand a year. So thank you, us government, but wow.

Maia Bittner:

Not that much ketchup that's uh.

Sam Maule:

Yeah, because I believe once you enroll in medicare, you can no longer contribute. Yeah to an hsa yeah I'm really getting this, this end of the road thing, done down maya. You can tell I've been doing research there's uh, yeah, there's.

Matt Quinn:

There's one thousand one, two, fifty five and over. There's an additional thousand dollars you can add to your hsa's. It's catch up again, for, like, it's not inflationary tested. That's just been the number for 10 years, awesome. And then also, if you don't hit your contribution maximum by the end of the calendar year, you have until tax ridder turn day, which I think is april 15 in america to add a bit more, a bit more money, um, which I know it usually isn't an issue.

Matt Quinn:

But I think people set like a percentage contribution on their salary. So if you get a bonus plus like a pay rise, you will end up essentially having a gap all the other way around. Um, and again, like I have health equity and they didn't remind me and I was clicking around and then was like, oh, I'm missing like a thousand dollars from hsa. This is like ridiculous. Um, so, uh, yeah, we, we, uh, we do that, we do the catch-up contribution as well.

Matt Quinn:

Um, I actually, in the in the user research for harvest, came across um, a couple. The husband is turning 65 this year and will retire and has had a HSA since they were invented and has never taken anything out of it and has had it fully invested. So it's worth. I think it is a couple multiple six figures. And he didn't really know. He just knew that when I retire I'm going to need to put money on health care premiums. So when you retire, when you hit 65, you can spend your HSA on healthcare premiums going forwards.

Matt Quinn:

But he doesn't have any of the bills that he's ever paid for on his credit card. They never. Really. It was so new they didn't really understand this is how you can do it. So it was really interesting for us to say, okay, well, as we get going, we can probably find like several tens of thousands of dollars of healthcare eligible costs in your, in your grocery bills and your credit card bills, um, as as harvest kind of stands up. So, um, a very interesting use case, because we typically don't. I mean our gem, our de facto position is that people should not be spending their hsa.

Maia Bittner:

If you can, if you can I was gonna say, yeah, and we, we kind of go right into the details but give us a highlight like so we talked about should not be spending their HSA, if you can, if you can. I was going to say, yeah, and we, we kind of dove right into the details but give us a highlight Like so we talked about HSAs, what is the opportunity for tech to help here? Right, we're always interested in the FinTech angle, like why were you so motivated to start Harvest?

Matt Quinn:

So there's yeah, there's like three questions there to unpack. So fundamentally right, if you want to do this the right way. You want to max out your HSA contributions to your account every single year. When you do have out-of-pocket costs, you actually don't want to spend your HSA on those costs. You want to put them on your credit card, ideally, so you get all the points or some form of cash and then to hold on to those records and at a undefined future date you could just reimburse yourself the amount of eligible costs back to your bank. So what you can do is then allow that money in your HSA to grow in the stock market. It mines all in, like VT sacks or one of the Vanguard in the low cost index funds. Grow for 15 years. Take out the eligible amount and leave the kind of growth in there to move forward on your healthcare premiums or whatever.

Matt Quinn:

That is the ideal way to do this. Even to think about that comes with a bunch of admin. So there's a couple of things in there. One is max out every single year. The providers don't tell you, so you have to remember I'm maxing out this much or I've put in too much. I need to make sure that we're going to get, get that appropriately maxed out.

Matt Quinn:

Two is make sure your funds are invested. So health equity your default, put them in a cash account. You then have to opt in to putting them in the market. They actually-sneakily just added a fund, a charge, on your fund balance. So I know most of the people at my org who use health equity are now switching over to fidelity, which don't charge anything to use low-cost funds plus health equity also only give you like seven investment options and they're all pretty bad. So you want to make sure you're putting it probably in fidelity to invest in pretty decent low-cost index funds across market, or you can be more specific.

Matt Quinn:

I think ultimately that's something that Harvest would love to explore. And then you need to manage appropriately. Manage the documentation of what you spend out of pocket. So when you reimburse, there's then a three-year statute of limitation that the IRS can look at what you reimbursed yourself for, as long as there's no suspicion of fraud. So if I'm spending money on pediatricians and stuff this year and I want to store that documentation for 15 years and be able to make a claim easily in 15 years time and have an ironclad case that I knew exactly what was going on. That just comes with a huge amount of paperwork and admin, and so for me personally, when I finally said, okay, four thousand dollars for me, my wife has to say it's four thousand dollars for her like this is enough money that we should start looking at this.

Matt Quinn:

Uh, you know this kind of magic reimbursement system. We were taking pictures of bills. We're sticking them for us Airtable. But most people I've spoken to are taking photos, sticking them in Google Drives, taking renaming file names, sticking them in Google Sheets really just the most laborious record keeping you can do. That got us to a certain level of doing Airtable. Okay, I have my PDF, I have my, my context, whatever. But, um, the magic here has become, if you really are a bit frugal like me, in 2020. Uh, with the pandemic, the laws changed such that, uh, things that were kind of covid related became hsa eligible. So, all of a sudden and that's retrospective all of a sudden and that's retrospective all of a sudden for the past 10 years, anything you've spent on antacid, headache stuff, cold and flu medication, masks, hand sanitizer, diaper cream for your kid or anything that has an SPF number so makeup with one SPF all of a sudden became HSA eligible to document.

Maia Bittner:

I think even my air purifier is. I sent it to my FSA which.

Matt Quinn:

I have mostly for smoke, Aura rings prescription glasses, like so much stuff, has become eligible To track down the odd $5, $15, $125 in grocery on Amazon All of that is basically nonsensical.

Matt Quinn:

I tried it, which is really what the personal pain was like. I need to be able to automate this, and so I spent two hours going through three years of Amazon history to pull out $700 of eligible spend and kind of went, that was just Amazon that didn't touch Costco Sam's Club spend and kind of went, that was just amazon that didn't touch costco sam's club, king supers, all of my other um kind of grocery locations, and uh, and said, yeah, okay, this is a better way and that's that's fundamentally what um, what harvest is working on. So we both give you the tools to safely document all of this paperwork forever and at the click of a button you can download it all. It will be there. You don't have to worry about the service dying it's not going to happen, but sure, um. And then also we have found a way to pull through amazon history, flag everything you spent money on that's hsa eligible um and store that as well, store those receipts and at some point, whether you need it now or a future.

Matt Quinn:

You can kind of literally push a button and and get the reimbursement processed. Um, and we've started with Amazon, but very soon it will be Sam's Club, costco everywhere, american's shop that keeps an online record of your grocery shopping.

Sam Maule:

So we actually did an episode Matt I can't remember when a few weeks ago, maya where we talked about startups, right and talking about okay, tell me about the product, what is the problem you're solving? You've done a great job, we've got that covered. I think we can check the box and say we got it. One of the flip things in my always talk about is okay, cool, so what's your business model, what's the revenue model? So can we go there?

Matt Quinn:

Sure, sure. I think it's definitely a big question for us on when we've written it down. There's so many points of value that we add here and capturing a slice of that value is a little tricky. Some ways that we've seen it done and have been suggested to us is OK, why don't you charge on reimbursement? And the challenge with that is two things. We really don't want to encourage people to reimburse this money. We would like to help enable them to store this kind of account balance for as long as possible, and so for us to start, we're just saying hey, look, you can upload all your documents, you can store all this stuff for 15 years, totally fine. There's really not enough value there for us to go and try and take a slice. But I spent two hours trying to find just my Amazon history. Right, that was $700. If I can push a button and that can find $700 for me, harvest is asking okay, if we find anything that is a grocery expense in the last 12 months, we would love a 3% finder's fee, and as those items age, I think it becomes a 4% finders fee. So you can push a button and we'll say hey, we found $1,000 worth of stuff If you don't want to pay for it. It's here. It will just get a little bit more expensive as you kind of wait, but if you paid $4, you will have these expenses in your account for the rest of your life. You have access to it, you have all the documentation and that's definitely where we're starting.

Matt Quinn:

There's a whole bunch of avenues that come off of that and we're still trying to gauge where people are on data privacy, one of the things that becomes quite interesting when you have somebody doing this every six months and running to keep this data. We get really, really fresh unified customer data at the item level. So somebody could look at my profile, for example, and see, like, okay, well, on Amazon, I buy this brand of diapers every single month, but when I go to the grocery store, I'm buying this, and when I go to Sam's Club, I'm buying this. There isn't really a service that takes all of those three things together, right, because you could slice one of those things off and make a whole bunch of assumptions, as me as a customer. So there's two parts there which is like can we get enough data and then anonymize it to make it both comfortable for the user and also valuable for the business, but that's something we're exploring. Still, that works best, obviously, at a critical mass. No, I get it.

Sam Maule:

It's kind of like rocket money right, maya, I'll go out and find all your subscriptions, I'll do the work for you. So you're a painkiller. What is the laborious part of it? What's the pain you're solving? It makes sense, right? So rocket money does it, because it goes out and finds out all the apps you're subscribed to or subscriptions you have, and then cancel them for you. It's like and the yin to the yang of that. This is finding money that you have spent and is applicable for this, or saving you and saving time.

Matt Quinn:

It's one of the greatest things in the world you can do is save me time exactly, and I think there's um, one of I won't say heartbreaking, but one of the like upsetting parts of this is uh, I mean, I'm having my own health care experience at the moment. Everything in my experience about the healthcare system and these accounts is like not easy. It's just not simple, complex, like simple and understandable. And so, as we've delved further into this area, I meet people who think that they are the most financially savvy people on the planet and they don't understand the hsa. They don't understand how it works, they don't understand how they get money out, and so they will actively spend their account balance every single year because they want that cash as soon as possible. Um and uh.

Matt Quinn:

Then, when it comes to the fsa, which is kind of it's like a little sister which we also work with, people will actively go and look for stuff, and it's usually stuff. They go filter for FSA eligible stuff, hsa eligible stuff. They go oh, I'm going to buy an aura ring. I don't even need to sleep track, but I'm just going to buy it because I know it's eligible and I can get the cash out. And that's just really challenging to see that someone would waste an opportunity, right, but they don't necessarily realize it on the flip side. So we get to say, hey, you don't actually need to do that.

Matt Quinn:

We've already found the $2,000 you need back today. Just push a button, pay a little fee and push a button and you get to save an enormous amount of cash there. When I was looking into the space originally, and you just search FSA or HSA on Twitter, you can start to see this. You get people who I think are a bit more vanilla with their money and potentially with careers get looped into. Oh, you know, sephora is now HSA eligible because they've managed to make all the foundations one SPF and the mascara is one SPF. And so it gets to November. Someone goes oh, I've got $2,000 in an FSA, I'm just going to spend it on Sephora and you're like I could just give you $2,000 of cash or $1,999 of cash. You don't need to waste this money in that way.

Maia Bittner:

Well, that's cool, and not only that. People are always pitching me fintech startups. I feel like half of the pitches I get are saying you know, 50% of Americans don't have $400 or you know, and they come up with then like bad solutions to that problem, usually lending. And so this is kind of a solution to that problem, right, helping out Americans who have cash flow crunches, but in a pretty financially advantageous way, which is like great, you've got this HSA. The best thing to do is to hold it until retirement. But if you need cash now for some kind of an emergency and you've been tracking your eligible expenses and you've been buying them with a credit card and not expensing them to your HSA, historically you can kind of help people out in that way.

Sam Maule:

I mean, it's one of those things. Right, you're guaranteed a couple of things. One you're going to pay taxes, right, I mean, we know that. But the other is and again, this is, this is your uncle Sam, everybody who's 57 and looking forward to the horizon You're going to get sick. You're going to get sick.

Sam Maule:

I go to the gym every day, I work out and all that. I know what those costs are going to look like. One, because I grew up with a mother who had multiple sclerosis, so we saw those kinds of bills. But two, I'm also at the stage of my life where I had to take care of my father and in-laws because they had aged Right, and so I. It's just, those medical costs are coming. We're all going to get hit by it. I don't care how good you are.

Sam Maule:

Arnold Schwarzenegger had a heart attack. Arnie, come on, the man has hospital bills, just like the rest of us. So this is one of those things that earlier you get. Now I'm going to get off of this recording and go yell at my daughters and say what are you doing on your HSAs? Because it makes sense. It's one of those start early, right, maya? We talked about this with the kids and the college savings plans. This fits right into. I think we could build a checklist coming out of this podcast. Maya, for all right, you're 18. Cool, here's all the things you should be looking at when you start your career.

Matt Quinn:

It's definitely. I mean there's also some idealistic parts to it. I don't think that there's monetizable value here. But if you are embracing being totally accountable to your health and making healthy decisions, we would in theory have the opportunity of looking at everything you buy at the grocery store and flagging and say, hey, you actually probably could swap this for this. Or like the science is trending that like if you eat that thing for long enough, you're going to be in serious trouble in 20 years. Like if you eat that thing for long enough, you're going to be in serious trouble in 20 years.

Matt Quinn:

I think that that's an untested idea that I would personally love. I don't know how the average American who wants to be left alone kind of would feel about it, but I do know like people are eating. I would say I just recently discovered I've been putting red forth like stuff with red 40 in my food. I use that mio, you know electrolyte stuff. I'm doing a bunch of exercise and I was looking at the ingredients the other day, being like I didn't even realize I'm drinking this red 40 stuff, which is abhorrent, and I in no way should anybody been eating that. So it would be. There's like pretty cool things that we could do there with some of that data to try and get people to be a bit more accountable there.

Sam Maule:

The ex-Googler in me looks at this and goes yes, your personal AI that we're all going to have. That's going to help us make those financial decisions and based upon our individual spending history. If you really want to know somebody, there's two things right Know what their search history is, which is a whole other item. And then the second is how do you spend your money? Because that's what you value. That's just reality. Where do you spend your money and where do you spend your time? So matt, I mean, that component of it actually makes sense to me that that's something you could grow into. The more data you're collecting and the farther along you can do, it's still a value-added service it could be so interesting.

Matt Quinn:

Right like um, you get I know my, and I've discussed this before. There's a little blurry area where it's like are you giving medical advice do? Is there a? Is there a line? You cross there? But I think for there are. There are healthier choices that people avoid because they think they're too expensive in the short term, and I think we could do some really interesting stuff to say you know what? I can see you buy the cheapest eggs. Last year you bought 156 of the cheapest eggs. If you bought pasture raised eggs from the place you already shop at, that's a $20 change year over year. And here's all of the science that would say that this would be phenomenal for your health, things like that. They're obviously like-.

Maia Bittner:

Well, right, because they're trying to save money, and it's like, actually, you could save money by buying the more expensive eggs. If you take the right viewpoint on it, I think red dye number 40 is actually illegal in many countries, including Canada. I know this because I live quite close to Canada, I spend a lot of time there and their fruit loops are not as bright, live quite close to canada, I spend a lot of time there and their fruit loops are not as bright. Uh, but I think, right, it's like could you do not medical advice, but help me eat in ways that are legal in other civilized countries yeah, my uh.

Matt Quinn:

Well, now I have a one month old, so my parents are coming out this weekend and they are both, uh, americans, born, raised here, but I don't think they commonly forget what has happened. Every time they come out I give them a little talk. I'm like, if you keep eating the way you think you eat healthily in England, it's not the same. Quaker Oats has five ingredients in London. Quaker Oats has 50 in America. Be careful with what you're going to buy here, because it's not the same stuff.

Sam Maule:

We're all chemists.

Maia Bittner:

So one of the things yeah you make me think of with the eggs. Right is how expensive it is to be poor. Long term, it's cheaper to buy the better eggs because you're going to be spending less money on health insurance. That's probably true regardless of whether you're using an HSA or even a standard health insurance plan. But some people just can't afford that. And HSAs in general, this whole plan about like well, just cover your health expenses, now let the money compound in your HSA accounts and in those investments might be out of reach for some people. Do you think that this is an advantage that only applies to rich people? Who can it help?

Matt Quinn:

That's a good question, definitely something we're cognizant of. There's like a two-tiered answer, right? So if you have a HSA, there's 30 million HSA and FSA account holders in America.

Maia Bittner:

If, you have a.

Matt Quinn:

HSA. Typically you work for a pretty big company, so I don't think it is your small businesses that are offering these plans. It is a Broadcom or a Wells Fargo or a Facebook. So right off the bat, you probably have a higher than median income, I would imagine, or you're on the path to do that, I would imagine, or you're on the path to do that.

Matt Quinn:

So it definitely sparks a different conversation around, like cost of healthcare and getting, getting getting access to some of these things.

Matt Quinn:

It's a less, it's an absolutely like less than ideal situation.

Matt Quinn:

There's nothing, really nothing, worse than seeing the, the cost of healthcare and food and everything to the hardest hit kind of Americans.

Matt Quinn:

It's not, it's just really not an area I think that we know how to address in many ways.

Matt Quinn:

But it would be interesting to see as time goes on, from maybe I think this well from maybe more of an altruistic standpoint, but it'd be really interesting to see what parts of harvest we could repurpose to give average joe the same level of opportunity and reviewing what they buy and um, and saving money and I think the there's definitely another piece here around, like I've seen people who, uh, who have taken money out of the hsa's in an emergency right.

Matt Quinn:

So let's say you, even if you, um, are a bit of a higher income, you still have emergency spending. If we, we have this idea, that's like if we are tracking all of your out-of-pocket medical expenses and grocery bills and we know the hsa balance is fifteen thousand dollars and you have ten thousand dollars you can reimburse today, instead of liquidating that, hurting yourself on a 20-year timeline away from investing those funds and also paying the tax penalty, there's room there to give someone quite favorable credit terms away from the penalty and say, okay, we'll give you a six-month loan, worst case security, we'll reimburse this amount and take the money back from you.

Matt Quinn:

So you don't have to incur that tax penalty Penalty is 20%. So if the six month loan interest is within that like, you won't actually have to pay that penalty, and so we don't feel that that it would be predatory. We actually feel like there's a lot of value in every party there, so there's definitely a future ambition for us party there. So there's definitely a future ambition for us. But right now, tracking this out-of-pocket HSA amount is effectively like a ghost asset in many ways, and I think we could create a lot of comfort for people who do need a lot more, who have unpredictable cash flow problems, let's say but yeah, yeah, the idea is fantastic, fantastic.

Sam Maule:

It's one that'll be interesting to watch how this grows. There's a pun everybody, so, so, matt. Where's the best place for the people that are listening to understand more about harvest and where y'all are headed?

Matt Quinn:

sure everything for us is online, so the website is hsaharvestcom. Uh, currently we have a wing list, but if you sign up early you geta little bonus where you can earn a percentage of everything harvested from everybody you refer and we're slowly letting people in to test out, test out the product and move forwards there and it's also a great link.

Sam Maule:

I was looking at the site. Anything you want to know about hsa's, just go there. I mean it's documented out. You can get a degree in uh in h. So, Matt, thank you so much. It's a fascinating sector to watch and see where this goes. Us healthcare everybody just make your head hurt. Well, that's it for today's episode. We want to thank you all for listening. Please do go out and give us a review and tell your friends about the podcast. Review should be five stars always. I don't think there's anything under five. Come on, Be good to us. If you want to reach out to me, give us ideas for a show. You can find me on Twitter or on LinkedIn. Maya, how about you?

Maia Bittner:

I'm also on Twitter at Maya B. I have open DMs. Feel free to message me anytime. And hey, thanks so much for listening to Artificially Intelligent.