Our Latest Addition: Part One

So way back in October of 2006 we signed up for some supplemental insurance to hopefully give us a little boost when our baby was eventually born. We were planning on trying to get pregnant a month or two after signing up, which was good because the insurance plans only cover labor/delivery if you've had your policy in force for 10 months. If everything went to plan (which of course it never does), we would actually double our investment (i.e. premiums paid) by the time the baby was born.

So we tried to get pregnant and it took a few months longer than we thought, and working the kinks out of paying these supplemental insurance plans was a real pain in the neck. It seemed like every few weeks they were fouling something up and all three of our policies were canceled at one time or another. There was constant drama and I didn't think it would ever end up being worth it.

Then the baby came. I ran around getting all of the forms filled out, calling customer service to make sure I didn't miss anything, reading and re-reading our policies, and making sure that we were going to get every dollar we had coming to us. We had gone through so much hassle for this, and I wasn't planning on paying for one more month than was necessary. So I wanted to get everything done and square ASAP.

It was pins and needles for a while there as we waited to see if they were going to give us the run around again now that it was time to pay out the big bucks (which I was sure they were). Surprisingly enough, getting our big payout ended up being the least obnoxious part of this whole process. Within a week the two checks arrived, and we were $3800 richer! Cha-ching! Our net profit after paying the bills and deducting premiums paid was $933. However, since we'd paid all of our premiums already, after the bills we had a cool $2055 to go toward our sweet, sweet TV.

That's right. I said TV. Stay tuned for part two for the rest of the story...

***P.S. - The other beautiful thing about this is that we can throw that $3800 into our high-yield savings account to earn interest for five months before having to pay it out. Why? Because we put the TV and the medical bills on Mitzi's new Discover card (which we got partly for this purpose and partly because she needed something besides an AmEx) which has no interest for six months. That means that those bills can sit on the credit card while our cash can sit in our account earning interest for five months (since it's now Feb and we got the card at the beginning of Jan). According to my calculations that's an extra $72 on top. Boo yah!