Younger children who still live with you. Older children who don’t live at home anymore, but you still support with insurance. Spouse. During open enrollment it’s time to verify that you have all of the proper people connected to every benefit they need to be connected to.

For every separate coverage, make sure all of the dependents are correctly selected. If you’ve got dental coverage, separate vision coverage, an HSA, a HDHP, and a dependent care flexible spending account, then you’ve got five sets of dependents to check for. In a common scenario of two spouses sharing coverage + two younger children, the first four would each have 3 dependents (4 covered people), while the last would have 2 dependents (2 covered people).

This item isn’t the most complicated, but it is an important piece of paperwork to attend to with detail each open enrollment. For example, you don’t want to get to January only to discover that you remembered to have your spouse drop their employers health insurance coverage, but forgot to do the proper steps to add them to yours.

A frustrated note on documentation. Some companies have the annoying habit of removing from the web interface all of the dependents you have registered for various benefits. I’ve seen this awkwardly combine with mistakes having been made. So my personal solution is that every year during open enrollment, if all of my necessary dependents aren’t listed right out where I can see them, I re-enter them. And then I print off a copy of my open enrollment documentation, with all of my dependents right there visible on the printout, so that come January if there are any problems, I have some form of proof that my enrollment properly included everyone to the best of my abilities.

One more potential issue for spouses. Some health insurance plans have started adding a spousal surcharge in some scenarios. Typically the scenario is that spouse 1 (employee of Company A) has better insurance options, while spouse 2 (employee of Company B) has really lousy insurance options. Therefore spouse 2 wants to be part of spouse 1’s coverage. Company A doesn’t like that Company B isn’t having to pay for their own employees, and charges spouse 1 an additional fee (withheld along with the medical insurance premiums) for enrolling spouse 2 with Company A. Several hundred dollars per year isn’t abnormal as a spousal surcharge. Spousal surcharges are waived when spouse 2 doesn’t have access to other employer-provided medical insurance, such as by being a homemaker, being an employee in a business that doesn’t provide health insurance coverage options, or being a business owner for a business that doesn’t offer health insurance. Another scenario is if spouse 1 and spouse 2 both work for Company A, then the spousal surcharge is waived as well. To have the spousal surcharge appropriately waived if spouse B is signed up on spouse A’s health insurance, there is usually an affidavit that must be signed by spouse A.

Your family’s coverage for next year depends on your attention to detail while filing out this paperwork. While his attention to detail isn’t the best, I always feel better if I have my spouse be a second set of eyes to look over my shoulder at the final screen before I hit submit.