You work, and are benefits eligible. Your spouse works, and is also benefit eligible. Your open enrollment periods, and benefit plan years, may or may not align with either. Never the less, to be efficient with your money (to avoid wasting it on premiums and to avoid having coverage gaps that could leave you open to excess liability), you need to coordinate your benefits with your spouses.

As you are signing up during Open Enrollment this year, make sure that all of the dependents (including spouse) are listed properly on each benefit area that they should be. This is an easy area to miss something, and then find out, for example, that little Suzy doesn’t have vision coverage for the year. Or that you both signed up for dental coverage for the family when you hadn’t meant to.

My recommendation is that you each print out your Open Enrollment summary sheets yet before the Open Enrollment period ends. Go over them both, together, making sure every important item is on the joint list once and only once.