Welcome to personal finance, military edition. I bet some you are sitting there wondering if this blog is worthy of your time, and rightly so. With so much information available on the web these days it can be overwhelming choosing what to spend time on, but given a chance I will convince you this blog is well worth your time. I will assume you arrived here because you have an interest in personal finance, or maybe you just found yourself here through the magic of the internet. Whatever the case, welcome to my little corner of the web! I hope you will find this site both educational and entertaining. Personal finance is a topic that is very important to me; however that was not the case for a large part of my adult life. Before we get to that allow me to give you an introduction to myself and my family; I find it easier to learn from someone after hearing a bit of their story.
I am in my mid-thirties, married to a wonderful girl named Amy, and we have 2 dogs that are very spoiled. As you may have guessed from the feature photo I am an engineer by trade, but I have had several career paths that have nothing to do with engineering. Some of my hobbies include mountain biking and SCUBA diving, racing/tinkering with cars, non-fiction reading, woodworking, and of course helping people with personal finance. I am also getting in to clay shooting more at my current duty station; if I get decent enough I might go duck hunting for the first time. In addition Amy and I volunteer on weekends at the local dog shelters because it is a worthy cause and we both enjoy spending time with dogs that need help. Obviously we like animals; Amy likes all animals but I am mostly a dog guy. We have had 3 dogs in total, all of them adopted. Our first dog was our yellow lab named Dozer, followed by our Boston terrier named Turbo. Although they were actually bonded buddies there were definitely some days Dozer did not care for his little brother, Turbo. Turbo would tend to try and steal Dozer’s toys and just overall annoy him at times. However, when we took the dogs swimming Dozer had the upper hand, as evidenced by this photo of poor Turbo nearly drowning (despite wearing a life jacket). I can only imagine Dozer was secretly hoping he drowned in this photo.
Dozer died in 2015 and a few months later Stella showed up at the shelter we worked at in North Carolina. At first we fostered Stella to help her get healthy again, but as you can guess the foster turned into an adoption. Stella was a lot of work; her previous owners essentially left her in a crate 24/7 so potty training her was a long process. She was also not cared for well at all, but after some TLC from us she is now a happy and healthy pup. If any of you were wondering Dozer and Turbo were named by me because I choose awesome dog names! Actually they were named for my work (Caterpillar bulldozers) and my car (turbocharged Trans Am), more on both later. You might be thinking those are dumb names, but they actually fit each dog’s personality very well. Dozer loved to put his head up against you and gently push, and Turbo is a surprisingly speedy little turd of a dog. Stella’s name was partly Amy’s choice: she wanted to name the dog Ella but I suggested Stella after one of her favorite beers, Stella Artois.
OK, enough with the dogs for a bit. As for me I am currently an active duty Ensign in the Navy, but prior to earning my commission in 2016 I was an enlisted Hospital Corpsman for almost 8 years. I joined the military later in life than many people, which had its advantages and disadvantages (more on that later). We are currently stationed CONUS and Amy is pursuing her nursing degree at the local university. Prior to now Amy worked at a veterinary office and taught college biology courses, but she wanted a more portable career so she enrolled in the nursing program. She will be writing a few posts in the future about spouse careers and attending college as an older student (while using the GI Bill). Now, let’s examine my life before the Navy for a moment.
Before the Navy
So there I was, graduating college with an engineering degree in 2003 (I know, a long time ago). Overall college was a good experience for me; I learned some things and did some fun things. I admit to having less than stellar study habits at times. My roommate and I had a tradition of buying a new PlayStation game for finals week. We then proceeded to study half the length of the exam (so if the exam was 3 hours we studied 90 minutes) and play video games the rest of the time. To us finals week was a relaxing break from normal college life. Now I am not recommending this at all, but despite that I earned a respectable GPA for my field. In terms of money I actually made some good choices back then, even though I was not well educated on finances. I took out student loans to pay for most of my tuition, but I held a part-time job all through my college time to make ends meet. My part-time job was working as a mechanic at a local NAPA car care center, and I also worked on the farm that my university owned. In the end I graduated with about $18k in debt, which is not bad. In all fairness tuition back then was not as inflated as it is today. Upon graduating I got a job as a test engineer at Caterpillar Inc. working on track-type tractors (bulldozers).
My job consisted of installing, monitoring and sometimes repairing prototype parts on bulldozers. I was fortunate to have worked a summer internship with them, and I loved the work so I applied for full-time employment shortly before graduating. As a funny side-story Caterpillar had a class that all newly hired people could take where you got to operate a wide variety of machines for a day. Looking back this was very generous of them, and perhaps a bit crazy. Think about it; they allowed a bunch of newly hired 22 year-old engineers to go out and operate massive machines all day. During my class we had 1 guy that dug a huge hole with an excavator on top of a hill, then along comes someone else driving a scraper that falls right into that hole. The scraper was 100% stuck, and our teacher had to hop on a dozer and go dig him out. The guy piloting the scraper fell in the hole in a way that his door was up against the dirt so he could not even get out of the machine. Most of us stopped and watch this event unfold because it took over an hour and was a good show. In the end the guy and the machine were recovered unharmed.
Moving on, I loved my job and made a good paycheck doing it. It was the first time in my life I had enough money to do some things I wanted to, which unfortunately I let go to my head at times. Now don’t get me wrong, my family was not poor growing up, but we were not wealthy either. I recall at 16 years old my very first car cost a whopping $200, and I put another $50 into her to fix a couple things. It was a 1975 Pontiac Astre, and looking at the picture below you can believe the ladies loved that car! In reality, it was a beater perfect for a 16 year old kid. It had a manual transmission, manual locks and windows, manual brakes, no AC and a 1 speaker AM radio. Ah the good old days (the picture below is not my actual car, but remarkably similar, even the very faded paint). Although it will make me appear old I will admit I don’t have a photo of my actual car because digital cameras really were not mainstream back in 1997.
In the end I worked at Caterpillar for 5 years total, and for the most part enjoyed it quite a bit. Being a test engineer I got to travel all over the continental U.S. as well as handful of times to Europe, which was great for me because my family traveled very little growing up. When I was traveling a good portion of that work was more like a mechanic in that it was very hands-on and not what you might picture when you think engineer. I am the type of engineer that does not like to sit at a desk all the time, in fact I hate sitting at a desk too much. Below are a few photos of me working at various job sites for your viewing pleasure. The first one is at a coal mine in Indiana, the middle is at a rock quarry in Pennsylvania, and the last one is at a workshop at a coal mine in Kentucky.
I met my wife Amy in college and we got married in 2006. We also bought our first home that year as well. I will have a separate post on buying a house later on, but buying, owning, and the selling a house had huge effects on our financial status (both good and bad). While I was working at Caterpillar Amy was working at the local veterinary office and teaching part-time at the local community college. You might say we had the classic American life: graduate, get married, settle into a career and buy a house. For a while we were content with that, but I eventually wanted something more…
Why I joined the Navy
At this point you may be asking if I liked my job and made good money why did I leave. Good question.
It boiled down to I wanted to do something I felt was more worthwhile with my life and serve my country. I was not getting any younger and I did not want to just work as an engineer for 35+ years and then retire; enter the US Navy. Quite a few of my family and friends thought I was a bit crazy, but I made the decision to join and stuck with it.
I graduated Navy boot camp in 2009, and then went across the street to attend basic corpsman school (if any of my fellow HMs are reading this corps school was still at Great Lakes during that time). I am sure some will get a laugh out of this but right after corps school was done I then attended basic dental technician school for about 2.5 months. I had no interest in the dental field, but the Navy did not care about my opinion on the subject. It was a case of if you want to be corpsman then you will do this dental thing as well. Truthfully the dental gig was not too bad; I got to wear scrubs a lot of the time and dental officers I worked with were great people (they tended to be a bit more laid back than the medical officers).
From there it was on to a few tours on the East Coast, including one greenside tour at Camp Lejeune. I enjoyed my time as a corpsman, especially my tour with the Marines. I had the honor of working with some truly great people, and made friends that I still keep in touch with today. I was also fortunate to have some very good (and a couple not so good) OICs and Commanding Officers. I had a few of them recommend I seek a commission, but for a while I didn’t give that much thought because I was not interested. I enjoyed many aspects of being enlisted and wanted to continue doing that for a while; remember I am not a fan of desk jobs. Eventually though I decided that there were some things in the Navy that I wanted to change for the better, and I was also ready for a new and different type of challenge. I submitted my OCS package, commissioned late last year, and recently completed the basic officer training course for my community. That brings us to present day.
Reasons for this Blog
Now that you have a bit of an understanding of me and my background let me explain the purpose of this site and what helps set this apart from the thousands of personal finance blogs. My main goal of this site is to promote financial education for military personnel, past and present, and their families. I will show you examples from my personal life, and as well as some of my family and friends, in the hope that you will learn from the good and bad choices. I am currently active duty, and as far as I know there are very few finance blogs run by active duty personnel. I was also enlisted for several years, so I have some direct understanding of the financial challenges enlisted people face. I served as an assistant and/or primary command financial specialist for the past 4 years, and I enjoy teaching and helping people. I also enjoy financial related discussions with people, and I hope some of the articles here will spark some good conversations. This is not a site that will advocate extreme saving or reductions in spending in an effort to retire at 30. I have nothing against folks that take that approach, but my personal philosophy is that a good balance should be struck between saving for the future and spending for the now. Being in the military I am sure you know that life is finite, and unfortunately is sometimes cut short. I advocate spending money, within reason and personal tolerance, on experiences you like. To me there is little point in depriving yourself while young and then retiring at 65 with piles of money only to realize you can’t physically do the things you want to do. Like I said, find the balance that is appropriate for you. I also hope this site will eventually make a small amount of money; it would be nice to at least recoup the cost of running the site.
I will warn you in advance that I like humor, and being an engineer I occasionally (Amy would say often) like nerd humor. Dilbert is one of my favorite comics; the author’s experience working for the government clearly shows in his work and it is very entertaining. Below are two comics that basically sum up how I landed Amy and a third about being an engineer; enjoy.
