By Lisa Gerstner
From Kiplinger’s Personal Finance
Flexible spending accounts, or FSAs, allow employees of companies that offer the accounts to set aside pretax money from their paychecks for out-of-pocket health care or dependent care expenses.
A little less than one-fourth of FSAs require account holders to spend all the money by the end of the plan year, forfeiting their funds if they miss the deadline, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. The rest offer some wiggle room, with 42 percent of FSAs permitting employees to roll over a certain amount of unused funds to the following plan year and 36 percent offering a grace period of 2 1/2 months to use up the money….