This article is part 1 of a series Sink/Tread/Swim, stories of service members and veterans financially sinking, treading water, and eventually swimming toward financial goals.
SINKING:
If ever you find yourself in your mid-20s, up late at night watching informercials on the couch and so broke that you’re drinking a concoction of cheap, $10 per bottle vodka and discount chocolate syrup mixed with nearly expired milk (my roommate at the time and I labeled the beverage a “Poor White Russian”) then odds are you’ve managed your finances very poorly.
And yet, that’s where I found myself in mid-2002.
After graduating from UCLA in the summer of 1999 with a degree in theater, I quickly learned that getting good grades in no way equaled finding success as an actor or writer in Hollywood.
So, saddled with tons of credit card debt and needing to make ends meet, I took a job as a pizza delivery guy in the fall of ’99, schlepping pizza and other mid-to-high end culinary dishes all over L.A.’s West Side to what were, at the time, up-and-coming dotcoms.
By the summer of 2002, the dotcom bubble had burst, and I was absolutely sinking/drowning in roughly $23,000 worth of debt, which is about $41,000 in 2025.
I was using some credit cards just to be able to pay minimums on other cards, and my debt was only growing. I was like a drug-addled, amped up film studio executive who insisted on throwing increasing piles of money at producing a flick that was obviously going to fail, only to try and reassure everybody involved with the project that all the perceived errors in the film could be fixed in post-production.
In my case, however, I knew the only “post-production” solution to my situation would be bankruptcy, which is something I didn’t want to ever have to consider.
Then, one night I was lying on my couch watching TV and sipping a Poor White Russian. That’s when a long-form informercial about the United States Navy came up on the screen, and I saw that I could serve my country, travel the world, do a job I’d be good at and maybe — just maybe — find a way to stop drowning in debt and turn things around.
Flash forward to the winter of 2003. On the 18th of February, I left LA and shipped out to Recruit Training Command at Great Lakes, Illinois, raised my right hand to serve my country for at least five years of active duty, and — despite all the stress, lack of sleep and by-design uncertainty that comes with bootcamp — I knew that I was no longer financially sinking into the ocean of bankruptcy.
No, thanks to something called the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, or SCRA, I was now, finally and gratefully …
TREADING:
Originally passed by Congress as the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act of 1940, the SCRA provides important financial protections for active-component service members who don’t have time to worry about breaking a lease on their apartment, or who have concerns about mortgage relief, when all those service members just want to go out and join the fight.
A 2019 survey by the Military Family Advisory Network found that just under 40% of service members were aware of the SCRA and the benefits it offers. And that’s a shame when you consider the program’s five most popular protections:
- The right to early termination of residential leases
- State residency protections for tax purposes
- The right to early termination of service-related contracts, such as cable, internet costs and mobile phones
- Income tax payment deferral
- A 6% interest rate cap on credit cards accrued prior to joining the military
That last perk was the one I was most excited to learn about when digging into the SCRA. With the interest rates on my multitude of credit cards brought down from outrageous rates in the high 20s and capped at 6%, I knew I might finally be able to stop the financial bleeding and at least be able to meet my minimum payments each month without sinking further into my ever-expanding sea of debt. And by the time I shipped out to my first duty station in Japan in January of 2004, I was able to do just that.
Now, as a low-ranking E-3, I couldn’t (or didn’t want to) chip away at the $23K I owed various creditors, but I was at least able to stanch the bleeding.
It’s just that money is so, SO easy to spend when stationed in Japan; especially when you’re young and single.
Like, have you heard the one about the single Sailor who would blow through a massive chunk of cash most Saturday nights at a trendy Tokyo night club trying to make conversation with the female American service members who showed up, only then to be abandoned on the dance floor once the overweight and past-their-prime band The Offspring decided to wander in off the street and set all the ladies into a tizzy at 3:00 a.m.? … (Thanks, “Noodles.”)
Lucky for me, however, I eventually met and fell for an amazing woman a year and a half into my overseas tour. She was also a journalist — and who was also no fan of The Offspring — and suddenly I was able to reign in my excessive, late night and off-base spending.
In the ensuing years, I would end up transferring back stateside to San Diego and I would eventually transition from the active component to the Navy Reserve. As I got into my mid-30s and matured more as a person, my spending and budgeting habits matured, as well. For a few years there, I was chipping away at my credit card debt, rather than just paying the bare minimum. It wasn’t much, but at least I was putting some semblance of a dent into my debt, and I was very persistent in always being on time.
And persistence pays off.
The first time I checked my own credit score, circa 2015, it was in the 800s. I was ecstatic. I was near bankruptcy prior to joining the Navy in 2003. Now I had a high enough credit score to be offered a cup of the same coffee the manager drinks at the used car dealership. It was a feat I never would have thought possible.
Luckily it wasn’t 2006. That version of me would have rushed off base to the nearest car dealership to snag a brand-new, no-down-payment Dodge Charger at 28% interest. Thankfully, though, the 2015 wiser version of me decided to celebrate such a high score by foregoing the Dodge Charger and purchasing tickets to the San Diego Chargers game, instead.
SWIMMING:
By late 2015, and after 12 years of treading financial water, so far as dealing with my debt goes, I had managed to bring the burden down to about $18,500. Only paying down $4,500 over 12 years ain’t much, but it’s something.
Still, I was (at the time) married and raising two boys, and I knew I needed a way to get past the “treading water” phase of keeping my debt in check and start finding a way to “swim” toward the shore of future financial security. Working for about $60,000 a year as a paralegal for the San Diego D.A.’s office at the time was enough to get by, but it wasn’t enough to really make the strides I wanted in becoming debt free.
And then, Djibouti called.
For the majority of 2016, I served as production chief for Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa’s public affairs office, working out of Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti.
It was something I felt a little guilty about, being that I was making the same amount of combat and hazardous duty pay as my senior NCO brothers and sisters who were still fighting in Afghanistan while I was on a base in East Africa that had a swimming pool and a Pizza Hut.
But I also I knew that I could only control what I could control, so I focused on being the best leader I could be while also throwing as much of that lucrative pay at my debt as possible, hoping to maybe, finally start swimming toward financial independence.
Going from netting approximately $4,200 a month as a paralegal in San Diego to essentially doubling that (roughly $8,000 per-month, net) as a senior enlisted leader in a desert nation halfway around the world makes that attempt to “swim” rather easy (though I never actually swam in the Camp Lemonnier pool).
The beauty of being mobilized to an austere location where you aren’t allowed to leave base due to the terror threat is that it’s easy NOT to blow money on anything other than matters that require the most budgetary fiscal attention.
With each passing month during my tour at CJTF-HOA, I would always make sure to throw as much paycheck money as possible at all my debts once I covered the rent, insurance and utilities for my family back home.
It’s like I was back to being that overzealous Hollywood executive; only now I knew that I was safely investing my extra cash into a guaranteed box office hit, rather than just sinking the funds into a sequel to “Pearl Harbor” or “Battleship.” (All my fellow Navy peeps can fight me, if you think I’m wrong.)
Also, only using my bank-issued debit card for all expenses, rather than spending imaginary money with one or multiple credit cards — as I had for so many years in the past — really helped me to become more financially mature.
Upon getting home to San Diego, I was debt free and finally able to start saving some money instead of paying into the ghostly burdens of my foolish spending dating back two decades, and to finally start being a responsible adult … at 40.
(Hey, better late than bankrupt.)
Today, I have a moderate amount of savings in the bank, I’m still serving in the Navy Reserve while being blessed to make a generous salary working as a writer for the Department of War in my civilian status at the Pentagon.
I can afford to buy tickets for any concert I want within the greater 48 states, or anywhere promoters might still be trying to assist The Offspring maintain whatever relevance they once had long before the night in 2005 they came and ruined my chances of having a connection with that 20-something, U.S Army Vet-Tech stationed at Camp Zama.
Looking back on the 22 years that I’ve gone from financially sinking, to treading water, to finally swimming toward financial security, I just find myself grateful to all of the resources that the Navy — and the U.S. military, as a whole — have provided service members like me to educate myself on how to be more financially responsible, and to know that nobody is alone when it comes to trying to claw out of deep and seemingly terminal financial burdens.
And now that I’ve told my own story, I encourage anybody from the military who wants to tell their own “Sink/Tread/Swim” story to reach out and let me interview you and then make your unique story public.
The more financial knowledge that gets spread around, then maybe less Dodge Chargers will continue to be sold at predatory, 28% interest rates.
All stories are welcome (even those from fans of The Offspring).
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