AFLAC

I thought I better share a somewhat unknown opportunity to those ladies who are reading this blog and are currently pregnant with multiples. This little tidbit of information has realllllly paid off for us, and I hope it can for someone else too! All you need to do is be able to afford a trip to California or if you live there already- perfect!!Let me back track a bit....

When I was lounging on the couch one evening surfing one of my online mother-of-triplets community boards I read the most interesting post about a family that was able to collect over $30K dollars from Aflac when all was said and done with their pregnancy and NICU stays for the premature triplets. Yes, you heard me right, over thirty.thousand.dollars!!!! She broke down the payments she received (I would love to do this- but do not have the time at all!!) and it was something like, $200 a day per baby for the 1st 14 days in the NICU and $400 a day per baby every day after 14 days! Say Whaaaa???? I could get PAID for having the babies in the NICU??? Granted, having healthy babies is priceless but as I layed there reading this at about 20 weeks pregnant I knew that it was almost inevitable that my babies would be spending a certain amount of time in the NICU, especially since I couldn't even make it past 37 weeks with Brody due to high blood pressure. I emailed the mom who posted her earnings and she gave me the name and email of her Aflac agent to contact for details. Ben was VERY suspicious of this but I went forward with the contacting anyway- what was there to loose?? It turns out that this was all legit information! There are a few factors that have to met in order to be eligible, like not having any pre-existing conditions (having multiples is not considered a pre-existing condition though), you have to sign up for a policy before you go into labor (we chose to sign up for 2- sickness and hospitalization,  in order to make the most moolah), oh and you have to sign up for the policy in California. This is because California allows policy holders to add their children to current policies on the day they are born, where most states (including Oregon where we were currently living) make them have a 30 day grace period before being eligible to be added. It may not make sense in this case to sign up and pay a couple hundred dollars (and a plane trip to LAX) a month since hopefully the babies wouldn't be in the NICU for much longer than 30 days- but that's your call. We decided that it would be worth the investment and bought Ben a roundtrip ticket to LAX. Ben did not get to have a fun weekend getaway or anything like that- nope, my loving husband flew to LAX and met our awesome Aflac agent outside of the terminal and filled out the paperwork. He then grabbed some lunch and boarded the plane back to his pregnant wife and son about an hour later! I have no idea why him simply flying to Cali and signing up for the policy makes it OK since we didn't live there, but it does, and that's all that matters.

C.R.A.Z.Y, right?? But it is legit and it paid off for us! We have been able to collect on the 30ish day NICU stay x3, 45ish day PICU stay for Evan, 2 surgery pay-outs, 2 ambulance ride pay-outs, Brody's 3 day hospital stay, and a handful of Dr visit pay-outs that are allowed per calendar year. I can honestly tell you that I would give back ALL OF THE MONEY we ever collected to not have gone through what we went through with our boys- the NICU experience was expected (well, not ALL of it), but Evan's later admit to the PICU and multiple surgeries as well as Brody's were completely not and no money in the world could ever make up for what we went through during those weeks. Seriously. No price tag. EVER. No baby or family should have to experience that in my opinion. But we have all survived and the money has helped us through our journey so far and some is still saved for emergencies...but now I just need to cancel the policies since we can no longer afford to may the monthly premium- but I am soooo scared to do it! I have 4 healthy, no 5 healthy boys at home (and a healthy mama) and I really don't want to jinx anything....what would you do??