Pay medical expenses including Medicare premiums from HSA

I have the same question. I don't see any easy way to set any default that healthcare spending will come from the HSA?

E.g. I've enter annual HSA-eligible healthcare costs as well as HSA contributions. The HSA balance simply increases throughout and never has withdrawals unless I specifically add healthcare expenses as an scheduled withdrawal and specify the HSA account is to be used. This is cumbersome if out of pocket health care costs change often (e.g. 4 periods) in the plan. And if I change the healthcare spending in the expense tab, I have to remember and change the scheduled spending on the other tab.

And as the initial question in this thread asked, it would be great if unused HSA funds could be used for Medicare (tax-free payment of the premiums.

@stkeros The scheduled withdrawals mechanism is currently the only way to do this but we're considering an improved alternative for the web version due out in early 2024.

Stuart

Thanks for the reply Stuart.

So then how is Pralana treating HSA money that's not used for healthcare? Meaning, if I don't specify withdrawals from the HSA account, what "happens" with the HSA balance with respect to calculations such as smoothed spending, monte carlo sims, etc?

I'm also wondering whether I should somehow treat HSA contributions as Roth contributions, and adjust how I enter healthcare expenses. Or actually, it might be simpler to assume I don't withdraw from the HSA for healthcare spending each year but rather "save the receipts" and make a few lump sum distributions later in life as an easier way to model tax free withdrawals from the HSA. Hmm.

Sorry stuart, when in doubt I should read the instructions: "To model the reimbursements from your Health Savings Account (HSA), you could use the Scheduled Withdrawals Table as shown in this example wherein we’ve shown an HSA reimbursement of $2500 each year from 2022 through 2030. This will result in withdrawals from the HSA that will go into regular savings but with no tax consequences."

So I can estimate/schedule HSA withdrawals, and these will go into SAVINGS (as you note above). And thus I don't need to make any changes to my actual health care expenses. They are what they are, and the scheduled HSA withdrawals will go (tax free) into a common bucket to pay for them. I understand. So what I'm doing is tweaking my scheduled HSA amounts/years so that my HSA balance gets close to zero by the end of the plan.