What are the advantages of military life
There are advantages to everything. We choose one school because it has excellent sports programs, and we choose another because they offer the best education in our field of study. But having these advantages doesn’t do us any good if we don’t take advantage of them. Going to a school because it has a great business program and then studying English doesn’t really make sense. Now, if we go to that school because it is all around great and just excels in and is known for business, then English is a fine route to go. And it may very well be the best program that we can afford to get into. But if we join something for its advantages and then don’t take advantage of them, we are missing out.
But sometimes, we don’t even know what the advantages are. We don’t know the features that give us a leg up over something else. We don’t know the programs that could be helping us achieve our goals. And we don’t know what frustrations could be quickly resolved by something already in place.
So, there are two steps to this process. First, we have to know the advantages. And then, second, we have to utilize them. The whole reason I am bringing this up today is because I want to know, what are the advantages of military life? I didn’t become part of this community for the incentives, and I’m guessing you didn’t either. We joined because we fell in love with someone who felt called to serve. Taking advantage of the perks that it brings doesn’t diminish the reason we entered this life. It just helps to give us the most we can get out of it.
I know there are great advantages out there. I am utilizing some, but certainly nowhere near all of the ones that would apply to my life (there are also plenty that I know about that I don’t qualify for or need at this stage of life). We are currently trying to take advantage of a VA loan. This means we don’t have to have a down payment, making it much easier to buy a house. We used this to buy our Oklahoma home and are using it again to buy a house in Georgia. We also took advantage of our military community to find trusted realtors and lenders in both areas.
Another advantage is the BAH, which gives us a marker for how much we should actually be spending on housing. I know in a regular job, all that income is lumped together in one category, but I find it helpful to have the breakdown of base pay vs. BAH. We did remarkably well living under our BAH at our Oklahoma house. The same will not be true in Georgia because of the rising interest rates. And like everything else in the world, our money is not rising up to meet the inflation rate.
There are pros and cons to everything about military life. A pro is that we are getting to move closer to family, but a con is that we probably wouldn’t have moved this far away in the first place if not for the military. A pro is that we don’t have to have a down payment for a house, but a con is that there are still so many other obstacles to overcome in this process. A pro is that we have a housing allowance, and a con is that, at this point, it has not kept up with the market and what the actual cost of living looks like today. Obviously, the biggest pro to the military is that I get to do life with my husband, at least as much as possible. It’s an adventure, and I am so grateful to be a military spouse because it means that I married the man I love.
Buying a house is very stressful. We officially decided to put in an offer on Idlewood for those who read Wednesday’s post. And after quite a bit of issues with Docusign, we are just waiting to hear back from the seller. Wish us luck! Our interest rate has gone up since we started this process because that is the world we live in. But that took us from having a lot of room to negotiate to having very little. If the seller can’t meet us where we need to be, then we will have to walk away from this house that I may have fallen in love with (I know I said I wasn’t going to do it, but the heart wants what the heart wants). In this whirlwind experience of trying to buy a house in an area we know very little about, I feel overwhelmed, stressed, and panicked. There are still so many unanswered questions, and at this point, it is out of our hands. I want to place all of this anxiety on military life, and while I know that’s not fair, it’s where I am at. So before I get into too much of a negative place about life in the military, I wanted to check in with y’all about what the advantages of military life are so that I can remember the great things and not just the hard ones.