Running Through the List

I listed a handful of changes we went through that affected our finances over the past couple of years.

  • The husband got a commission in the military (ie he is now an officer vs being enlisted).
  • We moved (four times!).
  • The kids and I moved in with my Mom as the husband is overseas.
  • We bought a new car.

So first up, the commission! There are a few ways this can be done but for my husband once he finished his college education, he applied for Officer Candidate School and was accepted. OCS is basically boot camp all over again. The kids and I couldn’t go with him during his time so we went to stay with family, which financially was a good idea because going to OCS stripped the husband from all pays except base and housing money. So we lost a lot and at that point couldn’t afford to be paying all of our bills. That was a harsh reality, but my family is kind enough that they loved us being there. After spending a couple of months with my Aunt and Uncle, we moved on to stay with my Dad. We had much less household expenses, which helped us be able to continue to pay our bills and also pay for the husband’s expenses at OCS. Buying an entire new set of officer uniforms is very expensive, we paid about $2000, and that was with a discount the store on base offered. Luckily we did get most of the uniforms paid for via a one time clothing allowance and we were able to pay off the store by the time he finished and was commissioned.

Part of our four times moving is going to stay with my family, then we went to his next duty station, and then on to my Mom’s house. The military does pay for you to move if you are moving on official orders. However, going to my family was our decision and thus we didn’t have help paying for it. We also were apart from the husband when we moved to the duty station, so we paid for that while the military paid for him to move with our stuff. They also paid for us to move to my Mom’s house, as we moved as a part of his overseas orders. Of course our things are now in storage and we pay for that because we picked the storage unit and moved it ourselves, vs having the military pack us up and put our things into storage for us. I wanted to have access to what we had, but admit the unit isn’t organized as I imagined it to be and I haven’t really done much with any of it. I had this idea that I would be able to go through things, repack into better storage boxes, get rid of things, etc.

The new car! This is the biggest change and one I’ll talk about more soon.

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