The military pay system is not perfect, and there is room for improvement. But it is like that in the civilian sector as well. Very nice argument.

Let’s first make sure we are comparing apples to apples. The military does indeed have many different types of pay and allowances but let’s remember many civilian employers have the same TYPES of things. Hardship duty pay, hostile fire pay, etc etc are the civilian equivalent to commissions based on sales and performance. The military is simply commissioning you for your extra duties.

This ties me to your comment about it being hard to budget when your pay fluctuates. How do commissioned based sales people have an effective budget? I think we would be silly to criticize the pay system because irrespondible people are budgeting money they don’t really know they have. The only thing a soldier should base his/her budget on are his/her base pay, housing allowance if they are eligible, and food allowance if they are eligible. All other pay is a bonus or an extra and should be treated accordingly. This, to me is the equivalent to budgeting money such as tax refunds, birthday and christmas gift, and stimulus checks. We all know that you don’t base a budget on this fluctuating, mystery money.

The last thing I want to address is the issue of spending money and having the government take it back. Now, this is one thing that bothers me because they do come in and recoup it no questions asked without prior notification and that can be a headache. BUT, again, in your scenario an idividual chose to use the money to pay off credit cards as opposed to sitting on the money until he was confident that it was indeed his. Another comparison to this would be finding $1000 in the public dryer and spending it before you asked if it belonged to someone else. Any time you are being paid money from something that is known to be errored you should set the money aside as if it were never there, then you would have no problems when the grim reaper came for what was rightfully his.

I hope you have looked at all these things before we are so quick to point the nasty finger at an entire pay system. If anything I say we should blame the lack of financial education from parents, schools, and the military to our young men and women who are just learning what the “real world” is like.