With the Army it seems that there are two big hubs. If you get drawn into the gravity well of Ft Hood or Ft Bragg you tend to stay there your entire career. It will be broken up by assignments to Korea or Germany but then back to the hub (not counting current combat deployments). It always seemed to me that others seemed to move around a lot but the 82nd and 1st Cav guys didn’t.
But I think it is a valid point that it is difficult for a spouse to get a long term job with advancement potential. Companies are not willing to take the chance on someone who will be gone in a few years. A lot of spouses try to get jobs on post that may not pay as well but they can be transferrable to other locations.
Sort of a hijack but - how does a soldier’s officer know so much about his/her financial situation? Do they have little pow-wows about what’s going on in their lives?
You are certainly supposed to. There are limits as to what you can inspect in their private lives but you should be making health and welfare checks as well as periodic counseling. A good officer/NCO makes themselves available so their troops come to them when the problems are small rather than finding out once it gets out of control. Also if they start getting into financial difficulties the collection companies know to go through the military to collect.
In regards to financial management education, who would one have to contact to suggest that the military starts offering financial planning/budgeting/management classes? The military itself or congressional representative or someone like that?
I work for a part of the state government that offers free financial management/planning education type classes to citizens (regardless of income), and I don’t think the military is something our department considers as a target group. It sounds like it would be a good idea, though - I’ll ask around to see if my superiors know anything.
It is available. I have not been on permenant active duty for a while but it was certainly available to everyone back then. I would not doubt they is more available now. They have AFN commercials about being financially prudent and against credit card debt.
ARMY: 1961
Move every 9 months to 18 months.
E-2 = $83 avg / month. Live off post? Bawahahahaha
E-4 after 2 years + over seas + hazardous = $187 avg. / month.
And so on. When my son was in, ( late 80’s to 2000’s ) ) I did not even recognize his ARMY… It had not changed for the better but heck, neither has the country…
Absolutely untrue. I received military health care both as a dependent and active-duty (over 25 years). We didn’t pay for anything–no deductibles, no co-pays.
We received care from excellent military pediatricians, family practice physicians, and other specialists.
At one duty station, there was no facility for childbirth or military obstetricians, so my wife received care from a civilian OB and gave birth in a civilian hospital. She had a C-section, so the bill for the birth alone was over $15K, not counting the doctor’s visits throughout the pregnancy. At least that’s what we were told by the benefits coordinator–because we never even saw the bill.
Now that I am a civilian, I pay much more for health care than I ever did in the military. Of course, that’s an easy comparison, since I paid nothing for health care while in the military.
In addition to what **Loach **has said, being deeply in debt can affect your security clearence. My husband worked with a guy who lost his and was demoted because of it. The Navy does keep tabs that way.
Oh, and as far as general military pay goes, I got out 7 years ago, and still don’t make what I did then (corrected for inflation).
In addition, much of that pay, including allowances for housing and subsistence, were not taxed. Note that all of these allowances were in addition to my base pay.
Finally, as I stated, I didn’t have to pay for health care.
It is certainly a factor but they have loosened it up a bit in recent years. Even some forms of bankrupcy are not automatic disqualifiers for a clearence. They will look at it closely and you will have to adequately explain your situation during the interview but you can still get a clearence. The worst thing you could do is to try and hide your money problems or don’t mention them on the initial application.
Threestoriesfrom the Washington Post about military families with financial problems.
Age is certainly correlated inversely with experience with handling money. Anywhere you have people who are living away from their parents and handling their own money for the first time, you’re going to have people making mistakes and bad decisions with money. It’s not necessarily because they’re stupid, it’s because they are inexperienced. The military has such people in it. There are lots of college students getting into financial trouble for the same reasons.
Being well-paid isn’t a shield against financial problems caused by inexperience with money. If it were, there would be no lottery winners going bankrupt, and we know that isn’t the case. You could still find military families struggling even if military personnel are generally well-paid.
My Army Captain brother was concerned about this when he was active duty. He had enlisted asking him for the exact payday, when he himself hardly noticed payday. In his opinion, there were too many new trucks, motorcycles, and jet skis on base. The pay rates didn’t justify them.
If the spouse left at home is not working, you have a situation where the person making purchase decisions is not the one paying for them.
Not military, but I have worked a couple of jobs where the male breadwinner was required to travel overseas for months at a stretch. In a couple of cases I know of, the spouse left at home did not practice good fiscal responsibility. This could cause serious problems even when the husband was making six figures.
Not only was hubby not there to answer to when she brought home her latest purchases, but in at least one case I think she was depressed and lonely, and shopping was her solution. Now I’m sure she really needed some things, but just off the top of my head I can recall a second kitchen remodel and a mink coat. (Because, you know it gets so cold here in Albuquerque).
I also know a couple of military guys who married women from other cultures, plucking them from poverty. It seems to be the case that when one has never had any money, one doesn’t learn how to manage it. Almost like Dustin Hoffman in Rainman…any amount between $10 and and $100,000 is unimaginably huge and just blurs into “aboutahunnerdollars”.
When I left the military, I doubled my pay, including benefits. I suppose one could break down how much my civilian insurance was really worth compared to military medical coverage, but then we’d have to do the same thing for how military barracks was valued compared to civilian housing.
If you have no skills, or the only skills you have are taught to you by the military, then it’s not bad money. If you can get into the private sector, you can make vastly more money. But, not every job in the private sector, obviously. That’s a convoluted mess. In my case, as a bright guy disappointed with the quality of live for single soldiers, the chance to make good money rather than mediocre money was too good to turn down.
In my experience, we always had a lot of extra expenses when we moved. My husband was in the Air Force for a dozen years, and I was with him for 11 of those years. We moved five times during that period. Each time we had to pay for various things, anything from rent and utility deposit to meals out because we hadn’t been able to move into our new home yet.
I had some decent medical care when I was a military dependent. I also had some medical care that was so bad it was malpractice. I didn’t get a choice of whether I wanted to give birth in a teaching hospital (and there’s nothing like having a trainee nurse give twice the prescribed amount of Pitocin while you’re in labor). My dental benefits were that I could get my teeth pulled, for free, at the dental clinic, but nothing else. And if I wanted anything else done, I had to go to a civilian dentist, without insurance, and pay full price. We didn’t have the money for a lot of this, so now I am going to get an upper plate, because I didn’t get the proper dental care for so many years. Many times, the base medical center didn’t have the specialists we needed, so we went to civilian doctors. We had to pay the whole fee up front, and then file for insurance reimbursement. The base pharmacy didn’t carry a lot of the common childhood medications, so again, we paid the whole price up front and filed. Some services and procedures were just not covered, period, while others were almost impossible to get covered.
My husband usually worked non-standard shifts, so I couldn’t get a regular job unless I wanted to put our daughter in daycare. Daycare fees would have eaten up any salary I had made. I picked up a few jobs like throwing newspapers and bagging groceries at the commissary and babysitting. Even after our daughter was going to school full-time, my job opportunities were very limited, as everyone knew that Air Force wives were very, very likely to have to pull up stakes when their husbands got transferred.
When the base went on alert, that meant that Bill had to work 12-16 hour days. This meant that I couldn’t ever count on him for childcare, and he couldn’t take a second job, and he couldn’t take the free college courses that were offered. Plus, of course, he was exhausted.
Military enlisted pay, at low grades, is good for a starting job, but it’s NOT enough to support a family on, when Bill was in. It was great for a young enlisted person who lived on base and ate in the mess hall. Pretty much the whole pay was gravy, and could be spent on pure luxuries. For someone who was trying to support a family, living off base (not enough base housing), not that great.
We really didn’t have much extra money, and we spent our discretionary income on things like calling and visiting our families.
After Bill got out of the Air Force and got a good permanent job, we went from “barely scraping by” to “we’ve got money coming out our ears”, and we started being able to save for retirement, buy new cars, buy a home, and just generally enjoy ourselves a lot more. I only wish that he’d separated from the service after his first tour.
I work with a lot of enlisted AF folks. They don’t make much money. Yet they all drive brand new cars and live in fancy condos. And then they complain about not being able to make ends meet. I don’t mean to be disrespectful here - I have the utmost respect for those who serve - but for whatever reason most seem to live way beyond their means. I make significantly more than they do, yet I drive an old jeep and carefully watch what I spend.
In terms of deployments, the remaining spouse has to assume the role of single parent. It can be impossible to find a job that pays well that is also flexible enough to allow for time off for last-minute child care, such as caring for a sick child, or if school is closed due to weather; there are also the usual day-to-day things like food shopping and so forth.
To be fair, the Defense Department is working on some initiatives to find jobs that will allow spouses to telecommute, and to identify companies that will make allowances for the needs of military families. I haven’t gotten any personal benefit from these initiatives, but that’s what the e-mails tell me.
