Wealth & Wellness

A 5-minute read on why open enrollment gets ten minutes and portfolio rebalancing gets an hour, and what both decisions skip anyway.

Open enrollment usually opens with a screen that already has last year’s plan selected, and closing that screen without changing anything takes about ten minutes, sometimes less. Most people take it. The plan renews, the premium updates to whatever the employer negotiated, and the choice that will set the ceiling on a full year of healthcare costs gets made by inertia rather than comparison.

A December portfolio check runs longer, often close to an hour. There’s a reason it gets more time: the balance is visible every day, in an app on the phone, moving against a number that feels concrete. December adds a second pull, tax loss harvesting deadlines and year end statements, so the review gets scheduled rather than skipped.

What both sessions tend to skip is the same kind of check. The ten minutes on the health plan rarely includes pulling last year’s claims to see if a lower-premium, higher-deductible plan would have actually come out ahead, or checking whether the HSA contribution still matches this year’s expected costs. The hour on the portfolio rarely includes checking whether the account is still allocated to the actual goal, retirement in thirty years or a house in three, rather than just harvesting a loss because harvesting losses is the task on the calendar.

The gap in attention doesn’t track the size of the decision. A bad plan choice can cost several thousand dollars over a year in premiums and out of pocket costs before a single claim shows what happened. A portfolio left slightly misallocated costs less, more slowly, and shows up as a number that’s merely lower than it could have been rather than a bill that arrives in the mail. The health decision is larger and gets less scrutiny, because nothing shows the cost until months later.

The fix isn’t spending an hour on open enrollment to match the portfolio review. It’s borrowing the one thing December gets right: treating the ten minutes as a decision instead of a formality, with last year’s actual claims open in another tab instead of a default plan already selected on the screen.

P.S. Tomorrow: why putting a savings transfer and a workout on autopay work through the identical trick, and what happens the first time either one gets skipped.