Transitioning out of active-duty service brings with it a myriad of challenges, whether you’ve been in the military – or married to it – for two years or twenty years.
The questions are endless, but the two biggest ones are these:
Where we will live?
How will we support ourselves?
My husband is retiring in August after 26 years of active duty. While we had talked many times about what we would do when that day comes, we really only started thinking seriously about it a little over a year ago.
We always assumed we’d move back to Florida, where we both grew up and where we own a home. But as time went by and we had children of our own, and less and less family left in Florida, we started to rethink that option.
We realized the first thing we needed to do, was decide what was more important to us: location or job.
Since he is retiring after so many years and we have his retirement pay coming, we decided we’d pick a great location first and worry about the job later.
And when we did that, the whole world opened up to us.
That was scary. I began to obsess over places to live. Our kids are 14 and 11, and I looked up the best high schools in America, the best places to raise kids, the best towns to retire. I was all over the map, from coast to coast.
I was convinced we had to pick the perfect place because we were going to live there for the rest of our lives.
And then my husband asked exactly the right question: Why? Why did our first home after the military have to be our forever home?
We’re used to moving around. We get restless at the two-year mark. Our kids have never lived anywhere longer than 30 months.
In one of the retirement briefings at our base here in Germany, a speaker noted that most military retirees end up relocating three times in the first five years after they leave the military. We have seen that scenario play out amongst our friends. Nearly all of them who have recently retired or left the military have moved somewhere for a specific job. But many of them have moved again two or three years later, or even sooner, usually because they didn’t like the location where they ended up.
Once my husband retires, we will have six years left with kids in school. Ideally, we’d like to keep them in one place during that time, and then maybe move somewhere else after.
We still haven’t decided where we will end up. Instead, we have decided to delay the decision for a while by taking a year-long trip across the U.S. in an RV. Along the way, we hope to find our almost-but-not-quite-forever home.
The world really is our oyster.
