Deals Make The Fine Print Extra Fine

I wasn’t sure I could afford a gym membership. Then I checked the fine print on my health insurance.

Whee! Suddenly my local fitness center becomes a much better deal.

Remember, I do not have good health insurance. I pay about $350 a month, out of pocket, for a Bronze plan with a stiff, multi-thousand-dollar deductible. Then, even after I bonk my head on that ceiling, I only get covered for half of all other costs.

Fun fact / true confession / please don’t laugh: since I’d never dealt with deductibles before, I only realized recently that a deductible refreshes every year. I thought — silly me! — that you only had to run up a $5,000 bill or whatever once before your company came to your (partial) rescue. Isn’t it amazing that a person can live in New York City and work and raise a child and even write about money and still be so naive?

You don’t need to answer that.

Anyway, all of that being the case, it feels even more important to get everything I can out of my coverage. For the first time in my life, I’m taking classes. I started with a Boxing class; I almost fainted about 15 minutes in and had to be taken to a bench in the lobby and given a drink. A couple of days later, I tried again with a class called Impact. Ha ha! It sure made an impact on me. At least I made it about 20 minutes before the world began to spin.

In my defense, it turned out I was pregnant and didn’t know it yet. Also in my defense, I was a wimp who was trying to be less of a wimp, and I kept trying. The Impact class got easier, which is to say, I made it to the point where I could get through the full hour without collapsing.

At least until morning sickness intervened and, after throwing up on the street on the way home from the gym one day, I concluded I needed something a bit less intense.

Now I take at least one yoga class a week, plus a stretching class at 8:30 AM every Saturday, which is more commitment than I’ve ever shown to anything that didn’t give me an orgasm. And I try to make it at least once more to do some strength training or aerobic stuff on my own. Showing up to the gym 50 times in six months turned out to be easy, especially since the place offers free childcare. (I would get a membership to Hell if it offered free childcare.)

This week’s Do 1 Thing: Send in the reimbursement form. Then thank my lucky stars for the power of fine print.

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