I have monitoring on my credit report. It's an expense that is worth it to me because we are heading towards buying a house in the next year. I'm always afraid a medical bill from the past has slipped through the cracks and ended up in collection. It happened once about eight years ago, and once almost three years ago when we moved and it wasn't forwarded to our new address.

Since DH doesn't have any credit that isn't linked with mine, but I have a few things he doesn't have, we figured monitoring mine was the best way to go and then when we are closer to ready to buy a house he will send for his free ones.

Anyway, my score went up from 780 to 787. That bodes well for when we pay off a big chunk if not all of our unsecured debt with the Christmas bonus. Ideally I'd like to see it at or above 800 when we apply for a mortgage so we will be offered the best possible rates. Our credit union is currently offering 2.9%. I have liked having our current mortgage with them. They don't sell their mortgages like many banks do, so I would like to stick with them.

Yesterday DH ran the rest of the money through the HSA account. We've maxed it out. Actually we've paid more like $10,000 out of pocket on medical this year, which is substantially more than we can claim, but nowhere near the over 7.5 percent of income, so we won't need to itemize. Since we can claim the full deduction for the HSA, though, we should get back over $8000 like last year.

I've stashed every single paid medical bill and receipt in a file folder labelled with the year, just like I did last year. I don't remember how long we have to keep them for, seven years or ten years, but we have to back up the deduction if they ever ask. I'm kind of hoping that next year's medical expense isn't so outrageous.