Dealing with Life’s Unpleasant Surprises

In life, there are two kinds of surprises: pleasant and unpleasant ones. Pleasant surprises are the birthday party your friends planned for you without you knowing or the stray cat who walks into your backyard and quickly captures your heart. Unpleasant surprises are things like parking tickets and bouts of stomach flu. They’re inconvenient at best, and at worst can cost you time and money. Here’s some advice on dealing with a few unpleasant surprises that pop up in almost everyone’s life at one point or another.

Medical Bills

Your doctor’s office assured you that the lab tests were covered, but then you get a bill from your insurance company for two thousand dollars. Or you get hit by a car and have to go to the emergency room, which means you have to pay emergency room prices. Medical debt is a distressingly common cause of financial issues for Americans. The Affordable Care Act made some progress in reducing the number of medical bankruptcies that are filed each year, but the health care system is still expensive and inefficient in many regards. Even having Medicare is no guarantee that everything you need to be covered will, in fact, be covered. There are, however, options for supplemental Medicare coverage that you may want to research. PLans like Medicare Supplement Plan G can help cover additional deductibles, copays, and other expenses that croup related to medical treatment.

If you don’t have insurance at all, then you should know that the open enrollment period for 2018 starts Nov. 1 and ends Dec. 15. That’s half as long as it was last year. If you sign up during that time period, your insurance will start on January 1.

Home Repairs

There are home repairs you can plan for, and then there are home repairs that just suddenly pop up. If you know you’re going to need to get your house treated for pests annually, you can schedule an appointment and mark it on your calendar. But if one day you drop a bottle of detergent on an exterior pipe in your bathroom, causing it to burst, then you’re going to need emergency plumbing services. If you find mold in your house, it’s something you want to get taken care of as soon as possible. If you feel confident in your mold remediation skills, there are guides online for getting rid of the nasty stuff. If you don’t feel as confident, it’s best to call a mold removal expert and get them to come out to your house.

Mold can cause health issues, although the degree and severity of those issues vary from person to person. One person in the house may not even know the mold is there, while another person may have to deal with skin, throat, and eye irritation. If you suffer from mold allergies or have a compromised immune system, then it’s even more dangerous. Mold can hide in your house for a while before it’s uncovered, so there’s no reason to delay dealing with it as soon as you reasonably can. Think in days, not weeks. Once it’s gone, you’ll be relieved to have both your house and your health back.