Leave can be a complicated thing. Mainly because you want to maximize your time off and so you really need to think wisely how and when you want to use it.
You have what they call 'Leave' aka vacation days and you have what they call 'Pass' days. Pass days or Comp days are given to you occasionally. They are days you get to take off that you don't have to use any of your leave for. For example, Top Gun's commander was pleased with his office for doing really well on an inspection so he gave them all a Comp day.
You are the property of the Air Force. Therefore, weekends are not "off" like any other normal job. However, each weekend your are essentially given 'pass' days and don't have to go to work. You may be asking why I am mentioning this. Well it's because I'm hoping it will help you better understand the following.
If you want to take a vacation from say Thursday to a Tuesday. You would think you would only need to take 4 days of leave, Thursday, Friday, Monday, and Tuesday. Wrong. You would have to take 6 days leave and count the weekend. If you are away from your base X amount of miles you must take leave. I think this is stupid, for a lack of a better word. Because you can however
go out of town X amount of miles away from base on a Saturday morning and as long as you return by Monday morning at 7:30 to report to work then you don't need to take leave.
This works for holiday's as well. If you leave the 23rd of December and say it's on a Friday and come back the 26th, a Monday. You'd think cool, I only need to take 1 day leave, the 23rd. Wrong, you'd have to count the whole weekend as leave if you went X amount of miles away from your base. The point is why use your leave for holidays you get off anyways. You might as well stay around base for the holidays and then fly somewhere later so you get more days off in the end with less leave used. Does this make since???? I told you it was complicated.
*****AGAIN EACH BASE HANDLES LEAVE DIFFERENTLY. Larger bases will generally be more strict and smaller bases vice verse. This post is just to give you a general idea about leave. Mainly that weekend's count!***********
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Tax Season
Attorney's can do taxes and let's just say Top Gun could become an accountant with all the tax knowledge he's learned. The Air Force offers a great service to it's military members and retirees. If they qualify, people can take their taxes to the legal office to be completed and filed. You have to stay there while they do it but nonetheless this means that the legal office sets up a temporary tax center for the months of January-April. Top Gun was the attorney assigned this year to run and be in charge of the tax center. The base asks for volunteers, some are civilians and others are military members who choose to help and take a break from their normal duties during these months. Top Gun also uses paralegals from the legal office to complete the taxes.
I gave Top Gun an ultimatum. I said if you don't complete our taxes by the first of March, I'm going to embarrass you and show up at work with our w-2's and wait in the line like everyone else. So last night he did them. ALL, and I do mean ALL my friends have kept saying to me, "We are getting more back in taxes this year than we ever have." I was just crossing my fingers hoping that Top Gun and I wouldn't have to owe any money. Well this year we are getting twice as much as we ever have back. YAY!!!! I guess all the hard work of Top Gun preparing the law center has paid off for us too ;)
I gave Top Gun an ultimatum. I said if you don't complete our taxes by the first of March, I'm going to embarrass you and show up at work with our w-2's and wait in the line like everyone else. So last night he did them. ALL, and I do mean ALL my friends have kept saying to me, "We are getting more back in taxes this year than we ever have." I was just crossing my fingers hoping that Top Gun and I wouldn't have to owe any money. Well this year we are getting twice as much as we ever have back. YAY!!!! I guess all the hard work of Top Gun preparing the law center has paid off for us too ;)
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Can family move before JASOC graduation?
Short answer YES.
Mon, you are in the same time table as we were. Top Gun started COT at the end of May, had a 2 week break and then went back to Alabama for JASOC until September 11th. During that 2 week break Top Gun first went to his base here in TX. Where your hubby is stationed that is the place where the AF will pay for him to return to after COT, not wherever it is you currently live. Top Gun then flew from TX to CA on our own dime and helped load up our moving truck, hung out for 10 days and then went to JASOC. The girls and I then moved during the second week he was at JASOC. We did so for the exact same reasons you are contemplating...school for our kids. I just didn't want to enroll my girls in one school for literally 2 weeks and then up and move and throw them right into another school. I moved in late July so we had a few weeks to get settled before even starting school in our new town. I am SO happy I did that. Remember the school year starts at different times throughout the country. Schools here started a few weeks earlier than in California so if we had waited til after JASOC, my daughter would have missed a month of school here.
As an additional note, if your spouse does decide to come home to wherever you currently are (assuming that it's not at the base he'll be permanently stationed at) those weeks/days in between that he is not at his base he must count as leave aka vacation days. We didn't know this but I wanted Top Gun there to help us move so we took the leave anyhow. Which means when he got here in September he was already in the hole 10 days of leave. Which meant he didn't take any leave at Christmas or Thanksgiving because he only had by that time 1 or 2 vacation days accrued. It's a bummer but good thing there are a lot of holidays quickly following September that he got off anyhow. Oh and weekends are counted as leave if you are so many miles away from your base...which really stinks!! How leave works deserves a post all in it's own!!
Mon, you are in the same time table as we were. Top Gun started COT at the end of May, had a 2 week break and then went back to Alabama for JASOC until September 11th. During that 2 week break Top Gun first went to his base here in TX. Where your hubby is stationed that is the place where the AF will pay for him to return to after COT, not wherever it is you currently live. Top Gun then flew from TX to CA on our own dime and helped load up our moving truck, hung out for 10 days and then went to JASOC. The girls and I then moved during the second week he was at JASOC. We did so for the exact same reasons you are contemplating...school for our kids. I just didn't want to enroll my girls in one school for literally 2 weeks and then up and move and throw them right into another school. I moved in late July so we had a few weeks to get settled before even starting school in our new town. I am SO happy I did that. Remember the school year starts at different times throughout the country. Schools here started a few weeks earlier than in California so if we had waited til after JASOC, my daughter would have missed a month of school here.
As an additional note, if your spouse does decide to come home to wherever you currently are (assuming that it's not at the base he'll be permanently stationed at) those weeks/days in between that he is not at his base he must count as leave aka vacation days. We didn't know this but I wanted Top Gun there to help us move so we took the leave anyhow. Which means when he got here in September he was already in the hole 10 days of leave. Which meant he didn't take any leave at Christmas or Thanksgiving because he only had by that time 1 or 2 vacation days accrued. It's a bummer but good thing there are a lot of holidays quickly following September that he got off anyhow. Oh and weekends are counted as leave if you are so many miles away from your base...which really stinks!! How leave works deserves a post all in it's own!!
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Moving
Did you have the military move you or did you do it yourself?
You can do what they call a DITY move, Do it Yourself, which is what we did. We chose this route for a few reasons. Most our stuff was already boxed up b/c we were temporarily living with family. If the military moves you they come in and box everything up for you. They are liable so they will come 'un' box anything and everything you currently have boxed and redo it themselves. Crazy, I know. But the main reason we did it ourselves is because you can generally make money by doing it yourself. The military will pay you depending on rank and dependent status, per pound you move and by the mile. We used ABF, a upack, they move truck service. We loaded up the truck and they came and picked it up and delivered it to our new home, and then we unloaded it. They take it to a weigh station before and after and print out a ticket. That is what we gave to the military to determine how many pounds we moved. It cost us a total of $2200 to move our belongings from California to Texas. With 1st LT rank and with dependent status (married constitutes dependent status) and for the number of miles we moved we were given roughly $8000. They do take taxes out of the difference from what you actually spent and from what they give you. Thus, they taxed us on roughly $6000. We pocketed around $5000. As a side note, the military does not pay to move your vehicle unless you drive it yourself. We had family drive our car for us and I flew with my 3 girls since Top Gun wasn't around to move with us. They did pay for the gas to move my car though b/c I put some belonging in there and they do pay to move all belongings. So does that make since? You keep receipts so you can give them the total amount it cost you to move yourself so they know how to tax you. They don't actually reimburse you the exact amounts you spent. There is a set amount they give you, once again dependent on rank and distance traveled. So if you're moving just a state away you may not make any money moving yourself at all. You can find out what the rate would be that you would get paid before you decide for sure to move yourself or not. Oh and if we would have driven our car we would have pocketed a little over $1000 more. But it wasn't worth it to me to drive 26 hours with 3 little children alone :)
You can do what they call a DITY move, Do it Yourself, which is what we did. We chose this route for a few reasons. Most our stuff was already boxed up b/c we were temporarily living with family. If the military moves you they come in and box everything up for you. They are liable so they will come 'un' box anything and everything you currently have boxed and redo it themselves. Crazy, I know. But the main reason we did it ourselves is because you can generally make money by doing it yourself. The military will pay you depending on rank and dependent status, per pound you move and by the mile. We used ABF, a upack, they move truck service. We loaded up the truck and they came and picked it up and delivered it to our new home, and then we unloaded it. They take it to a weigh station before and after and print out a ticket. That is what we gave to the military to determine how many pounds we moved. It cost us a total of $2200 to move our belongings from California to Texas. With 1st LT rank and with dependent status (married constitutes dependent status) and for the number of miles we moved we were given roughly $8000. They do take taxes out of the difference from what you actually spent and from what they give you. Thus, they taxed us on roughly $6000. We pocketed around $5000. As a side note, the military does not pay to move your vehicle unless you drive it yourself. We had family drive our car for us and I flew with my 3 girls since Top Gun wasn't around to move with us. They did pay for the gas to move my car though b/c I put some belonging in there and they do pay to move all belongings. So does that make since? You keep receipts so you can give them the total amount it cost you to move yourself so they know how to tax you. They don't actually reimburse you the exact amounts you spent. There is a set amount they give you, once again dependent on rank and distance traveled. So if you're moving just a state away you may not make any money moving yourself at all. You can find out what the rate would be that you would get paid before you decide for sure to move yourself or not. Oh and if we would have driven our car we would have pocketed a little over $1000 more. But it wasn't worth it to me to drive 26 hours with 3 little children alone :)
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
He loves what he's doing
One thing that makes me happy is that Top Gun loves what he is doing. He enjoys going to work, he enjoys the variety of work that is placed in front of him, and he enjoys the people he works with. The thing with JAG's is that every 2 years they are moving stations and so are the other people in the office. Which means every summer half of the attorney's in the office are leaving. Which also means that you move up in Seniority and are given more responsibilities, more difficult cases etc, very quickly, relatively speaking. It can take years to be in a court room with big firm jobs when it was literally a matter of weeks when Top Gun was presenting closing arguments in front of a judge. (Something that was and still is completely out of his comfort zone. He is an introvert by nature.) This summer he'll have been a JAG for only one year yet he will be in charge of so much more come then b/c he will be the third in Seniority out of like 10 JAG's in the office. The experience he is/will be getting is priceless. Whether we are in the military for the long haul or short term what he is being exposed to is obviously benefiting him professionally but very much so on a personal level as well.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!! It was a great, white one for us. It was our first away from extended family but it turned out to seriously be one of the best we've had. I think this had to do with the fact that our entire married life, up to his point, Top Gun has had a whole month off during the holidays (b/c he's been a student). Which means we were accustomed to having him home all day to ourselves that on Christmas it wasn't anything extra special to just hang out at our house. By the time our kids would open presents we were ictching to go to my mom's or his parents house and meet up with our siblings and "play". Not to mention the huge, yummy feast we would all enjoy together! BUT, seeing that he now works and the weekends are full of one of us coming and going or doing family weekend vaca's, there hasn't been much down time as a family. Which is precisely what made this Christmas wonderful.
He did work half day Christmas Eve. I assumed he'd have the entire day off but don't ever assume anything is a lesson you'd think I would learn by now in the AF. Only the second half of the day is considered a federal holiday. He had Christmas off and they gave him today, the following Monday off too. He gets Thursday and Friday of this week off as well. So even though it's not a month, I think these 4 days will be more fully enjoyed and relaxing. So far it's been some pure, much needed family time without too much madness!!
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Top Gun Pins Captain
Top Gun pinned Captain a few weeks ago. YAY!!!! When attorney's enter COT they are 1st LT. Six months from the date they start with the AF they automatically pin Captain (there has been times due to paperwork or whatever else that it hasn't been exactly 6 months but generally speaking you can plan on it at 6 mths). It means a lot more to them than us. As far as a spouse's stand point it means he gets paid more money...roughly $500 a month more!! Anyway, if you are at your base when he pins Captain you are expected to host some kind of mini reception in his honor. They'll gather the entire office for the ceremony which last like 15 minutes and then sometime afterward you're suppose to have some kind of gathering (which includes food) to celebrate. We did appetizers and cake. Another Captain in his office took people out for drinks and order appetizers at a restaurant for everyone. Another bought party subs from subway and fed everyone at his house one afternoon. Really you can do whatever but just know you are suppose to do "something."
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