Plan for the Future

I'll wait for my audience to stop laughing.

See, it's well known among us in military families that we cannot adequately plan for the future. Orders change. Paperwork gets mis-filed. Regs get rewritten.

I have driven myself up one wall and down the next wishing I could plan for the future. The only thing I can do is hope that we have the right budget to support our family and can pay the bills on time. I don't know where we'll live or what our bills will be.

The future is just an adventure.

A Career on the Go

I am struggling with the budget. The family budget. The funny thing is that we have so much luxury, but I want more. I can't figure out if I'm being awful and selfish, or normal.

My cousin said she works so much because she's afraid to be broke. I'm not working because I want to stay home with my kids. That's not the whole story, though.

Part of my not working is that I'm being an elitist snob. I don't want to hand my kids over to be raised by someone else, so if I were going to work, it would have to be on my available time. I'm not willing to go down the street and work at McDonald's part-time or Wal-mart, so someone would have to practically drop a "career worthy" part-time job into my lap to get me out of the house.

I hope that writing can be a career for me, but actually earning anything is taking even longer than I thought. I thought I had earned enough to pay for Elaina's dance class by advertising on my blog, but Google has said that there were too many suspicious clicks and has denied me the use of their advertisers anymore. I have submitted myself to clinical trials, voluntary MRIs and medical studies to make some extra cash, but I thought I'd be able to buy new shoes with that cash. Now I'm going to be using it for dance and music and it doesn't even come close to covering gas.

I will take journalism classes in the future. I want to write. Writing is enjoyable and worthy, not to mention portable to travel with the military career of my husband. I'm just so scared that, in the effort to have it all the right way, I'm not using my own standards to measure my success anymore.

Option #1: Don't Go

In Spring of 2005 my two best friends from college married each other in Belize. I booked a hotel room and a flight to be there. It was going to double as a honeymoon for James and I, since we hadn't had one right after our own wedding.

Shortly after making all of the arrangements, James got a promotion and was ordered to attend a school for that promotion. Congratulations, Elyssa and James, you'll get more monthly pay but you can't go on a long awaited trip with friends.

We were reimbursed for a portion of the money we paid and we received a voucher from the airlines for some of the airfare spent. We were never completely covered and we missed a milestone.

So, if you don't go to family and friends gatherings you protect yourself. You can make the financial excuse, tell others you can't get leave or just say it's not possible. If you make this decision, you distance yourselves from your loved ones, but you also protect yourself from emotional, financial and leave-time losses.

This is just option #1.

Family Time

I was absent from the blog this weekend to spend time at an impromptu family reunion and a trip to a cultural festival with extended family.

Over the weekend I was confronted with the reality that I would miss another important wedding because of our family's military service. My favorite author on military spouses, Jacey Eckhart, says that we should make every effort to attend every extended family event. We have missed both of our best friends' weddings, and 5 cousins' weddings in the last 4 years. I have attended numerous events alone or with our daughter and felt like people weren't ever going to know my relationship with my husband,or my husband for that matter.

This week I plan on exploring the options enlisted families have for these family events.

The Budget

Yesterday I said I didn't want to be political. Today I'm backtracking. I think I just don't want to do anything that's not in my own interests.

I'm afraid of what elected officials might choose to do with the budget that might affect my lifestyle. I want to be able to live comfortably, have my own car, stay home with my children, earn my own income and have nice shoes. These can be really tough goals for an enlisted family.

I said that I think the pay gap between senior enlisted and officers should be smaller. This opinion is in my own interest. I see guys like my husband who will remain enlisted no matter how much education they finish. It makes it tough for a wife to look at another woman with the same education and background and not resent that she can more comfortably afford nicer shoes.

The raises approved by congress this year are the same percentage across the board. If we're talking percentages, that means that the raise is higher for people making more money in the first place. In some cases that's really justifiable, but some guys are just filling space and making more money. That seems inequitable. A guy making $30,000 getting a 3% raise gets a mere $900 more, a guy making $60,000 gets $1800 more and one that makes $120,000 gets $3600. Those numbers seem like a pittance in print to me, but I wonder if more merit pay would inspire guys to earn those raises. Maybe they do earn them through merit promotions.

I am a wife, I should probably continue to deal with my home budget and leave the military budget to people who hopefully know better. My vote is my power, though, and I'm thinking about it.