When I left my previous company a couple of years ago, I assumed my old Optum HSA would simply sit there quietly.
It held a mix of cash and long-term investments, and because I live in California — where HSA investment gains add an extra layer of tax complexity — I did not want to liquidate anything. Leaving the account alone seemed like the safest choice.
Then one day, Optum notified me that my account would begin incurring a $1.50 monthly fee now that I was no longer an active employee.
It was a small number. But it bothered me.
Not because $1.50, by itself, is dramatic. It bothered me because on a cash balance of roughly $500, that fee worked out to about 3.6% a year. That is not trivial at all for money that is supposed to sit quietly and safely. In effect, the balance was not just idle — it was slowly shrinking.
And the contrast made it worse. In a no-fee HSA earning even a modest rate of interest, that same cash could quietly compound instead. Over time, the difference between losing around 3.6% a year to fees and earning something positive is not small. It is structural.
Still, I assumed I was stuck. I believed that if I transferred the HSA to Fidelity, I would have to sell the investment portion, realize gains, and create a California tax headache I did not want. So I left everything as it was.
Two and a half years passed.
In that time, I paid more than $40 in fees simply because I did not know one important detail — one I had never seen explained clearly.
The detail was this: you can transfer only the cash portion of an HSA.
That was the part that surprised me most.
I had always assumed an HSA transfer was all or nothing — that moving the account meant moving both cash and investments together. But that is not necessarily how it works.
You can do a partial trustee-to-trustee transfer, moving only the cash portion to another HSA custodian while leaving the investments untouched.
No liquidation.
No tax event.
No disruption.
No need to close the account.
Just a clean transfer of the cash bucket.
If I had known this earlier, I would have avoided the monthly fee and the quiet annoyance of watching it chip away at the account.
For me, the lesson was never really about saving $1.50 a month. It was about alignment.
I prefer systems that are calm, low-spend, predictable, and friction-free. Paying a recurring fee on a small balance simply because I did not understand one small rule felt out of sync with that philosophy.
Once I learned partial transfers were possible, the fix became simple. I moved the cash to Fidelity, where there were no monthly fees and the cash could earn a bit of interest. My investments at Optum stayed exactly where they were. Nothing was sold. Nothing was disrupted.
It was the cleanest solution available.
I am sharing this because partial HSA transfers seem to live in one of those quiet corners of personal finance where the rule exists, but the explanation rarely reaches people who need it.
If you have left an employer, still have an HSA at a custodian you no longer prefer, want to avoid small ongoing fees, or simply want more control, this may be useful to know.
Sometimes the best financial improvements are not dramatic. They are small structural adjustments that remove friction and let your system run a little more cleanly.
This was one of those for me.
The fee was small. The lesson was not.
A related reflection on small financial frictions and the hidden cost of not knowing the rules:
How I Almost Lost a Piece of a Settlement and Paid $200 for a 10% Form: Lessons in Avoiding Financial Traps