High school graduates going into the armed services face money issues of different hues than their classmates entering college, says Bud Schneeweis, director of the Finra Foundation Military Financial Readiness Project.
Many of the enlistees have never been exposed to personal investment advice and neither have their parents, notes Schneeweis, a 25-year veteran of the Coast Guard and, for the last few years, a Certified Financial Planner licensee. He adds that means an enlistee’s temptations and needs to spend can be greater, too.
The money from their service paychecks is often the first they have had since they left home, and they are eager to purchase things their parents wouldn’t buy for them.
The push to spend becomes even greater when they marry; military members tend to get hitched at an earlier age than their civilian counterparts.
Adding to the financial challenges are that their spouses tend to lack the education and experience for good-paying jobs.
Sometimes, these new couples pay for two households because of deployments hundreds and thousands of miles away.
Even when the husbands and wives can move together, the financial burden can be severe because the stay at the new base or city can be too short for the spouse to find a job.
“When the transfer is overseas, some countries don’t allow U.S. civilians to work in local jobs,” says the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority expert.
Spending on gifts through online marketplaces can drain the paychecks of military members and their spouses and boyfriends and girlfriends far away. The lovers back home have been known to use this “retail therapy” as a partial cure for loneliness, he says.
However, Schneeweis says the greater access to credit has been more of a threat to overspending on gifts than e-commerce.