“The veteran population is relatively large, in excess of 20 million people, approximately 8% of the population. That’s pretty sizable,” Skimmyhorn says. “We’d like to know how they are doing. If they are not [doing well], we might think about policies that might help them.” And that policy architecture should be informed by recent data, he says.
He also says that since the military is an all-volunteer force, whose members could be seeking opportunities elsewhere, it’s worth asking whether the armed forces are providing their members with a better life during and after service. “The welfare of our veterans is critically linked to our ability to man an all-volunteer force,” Skimmyhorn says.
He used data from the 2015 National Financial Capability Study, a project of Finra’s Investor Education Foundation, sampling both military veterans and civilians (leaving out active duty service members).
Less Satisfaction 10 Years Out
In the latter part of the paper, Skimmyhorn looked within the veteran population, looking at how their situations compared among the service branches and how different their outcomes were for the length of time they’d been separated from the military. Some of those findings surprised him, he says.
“The veterans who separated 10 or more years ago,” Skimmyhorn says, “report substantially lower financial satisfaction, despite the fact that they have objectively better behaviors—less likelihood of unexpected income drops, less problems marking ends meet, having their bills exceed their income.”
He’s not sure why that is, though he thinks it could have something to do with our current times—the 2008 financial crisis might have affected the outlook of this cohort. Or the disparity could have something to do with the higher financial expectations people have at that age.
Bruer, whose fee-only Tallahassee RIA manages just under $80 million for 90 households, doesn’t target veterans directly in his practice (only about 10% of his clients are ex-military) but he says veterans do respond well to others veterans when seeking advice and he offers them financial education.
“I think one of the biggest things that a lot of guys in the military don’t take advantage of is some of the benefits that you have,” Bruer says. “They don’t know about the housing benefit of VA loans. They don’t know all the benefits they can have based on their disability rating from the VA. The VA overall is not easy to deal with. So you really have to do a lot of homework and a lot of research to know what you are entitled to. There are resources out there like the Disabled American Veterans or the American Legion and these nonprofits, and they can guide you but you have to be your own best advocate. Cause if you don’t know and you’re not advocating for [yourself], others will try but will more likely than not fall short.”
There are a wide variety of veteran benefits out there, and they differ by state, according to the American Legion site. For example, Indiana offers free tuition at state schools to the children of disabled veterans. Veterans can attend Connecticut public colleges and universities tuition-free. Oklahoma law exempts certain veterans from property taxes.