Many of us have asked ourselves that question for years. Do we (I say “we” meaning the active-duty member and the spouse, since it is a joint decision) leave at 20 years? Stay in for 25? Retire after three years at the highest rank?

Or just forget about retirement altogether and leave the military after five years, or 10?

Leaving the military, especially for retirement, is like having a baby. There’s never going to be a perfect time to do it. For most people, the question of when to leave the military revolves around two issues: money, and what to do with the next phase of life.

The reality is, there’s probably never going to be enough money or the perfect job offer.

My husband came very close to getting out of the military in 2002, when he had 12 years of service. He didn’t really know what he wanted to do in the real world, so he stayed.

In 2006, when he had 16 years in, we bought a house in Florida and decided we would stay put until he hit 20 and then retire there.

Nine years and four PCS moves later, he finally dropped the paperwork.

My husband and I are the same age and I’ve been married to him since he joined the Army 25 years ago.

That is more than half our lives.  I’ll say that again: We have spent more than half our lives in the military world.

At first we stayed because he loved his job and the people he worked with. He still does, but as time went on so did the toll on his body, both our psyches and our family. Still, there was nothing enticing enough outside the military to make us leave.

Now, he’ll retire in August of this year after 26 years. There still isn’t necessarily anything especially enticing outside the military, but there’s not much challenge left for him here on the inside, either.

My husband’s boss asked him why we wanted to retire.

The reply: “Because it’s time.”

His boss told him that was all he needed to hear.

How will you know when it’s time to retire?

Don’t worry. You’ll know. Because, it’ll be time.

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.

When my husband retired from the Army, we both hit the job hunt trail.

We each fired resumes to dozens of employers and within weeks had several interviews scheduled.

After my interview at the job that was number one on my wish list, I waited about 48 hours before I received the, “you got it” phone call.

My husband’s first choice job? He waited a week. Then, 10 days. So he emailed the recruiter to see if there was anything else he could provide to help the process.

No, the recruiter assured him. You would be hearing from them within the week.

Ok, so it was two more weeks. But he got the job.

And word came right before he was about to pull out his very last hair.

Why the wait?

Employers are not attempting to test your patience. I promise.

They may still be conducting interviews. They may have actually offered the job to someone else and are waiting to see if they decline or accept the position before calling you as their second choice.

An employer may still be working the kinks out of the actual position. If they decide to change the job responsibilities during the search process, you may be out of the running if your resume does not support those new needs. For my husband, he was deemed overqualified for the job he applied for. Luckily, the company liked him enough to find a position in the company that did fit his resume and hire him accordingly, hence the long wait.

It is completely appropriate to contact an employer after a week, thank them again for the interview, reiterate your interest in the position and ask what their timeline is for filling the position. It is also wise to hope you get the job, but continue your job search as if you did not. Sitting and waiting to hear back is time wasted that you could spend interviewing with another great company who might make you a better offer.

Military retirement pay is changing.

This week President Obama sent a letter to congressional leaders signaling support for the 15 recommendations drafted by the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission in January.

While the president didn't specifically endorse the changes, change is coming.

Overall, the recommendations would drop military retirement pay by about 20 percent. To close the gap, troops will be offered a traditional retirement account.

The DOD would match the funds a service member deposits into the account, up to 5 percent of basic pay. The service member would own the account regardless of how many years they serve.

Lawmakers have been long calling for drastic change in military budgets. After more than a decade of war, personnel costs such as pay, health care and retirement have skyrocketed. The center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments says in the last 10 years the cost per person on active duty rose 46 percent. USA Today reports that, after inflation, personnel costs will eat the entire defense budget by the year 2039.

The recommendations for changes to military retirement as well as other benefits, including healthcare, have been sent to the president's advisers to be refined. The president is expected to bring his changes to Congress by April 30.

After 20 years of putting a uniform on every single day, you might think your family is ready to finally be free from military life. But, it’s a hard transition to make.

The JROTC program allows retirees to continue serving in uniform, but leave behind deployments, months’ long training and other trappings of traditional military service.

Retirees must have retired in grade as E-6 through E-9 or W- 1 through W-5 or O-3 through O-6.

While most people think of JROTC staff as teaching in the high school classroom, there are also opportunities to serve at the Brigade headquarters and as a department head.

In any case, your daily activities will be very different from what you lived in the military. Instructors, like other high school teachers, will be teaching a curriculum given to them by JROTC. Instructors also work weekends and evenings, guiding their cadets through PT, leadership training and competitions and marching with their cadets in parades.

As a member of the high school faculty, you will be required to be just that, a high school teacher. You will work in the bus line, the lunch room, chaperone events and rotate through any other duties that the faculty is require to do.

In addition, some states may require you to be certified as a teacher. The JROTC website has a great guide for each state that shows how much, or how little, certification you will need to join the high school staff as a military instructor.

And, being a high school teacher isn’t for the faint of heart. When my husband was interviewed for a JROTC job at a tough, inner-city school, the first thing the colonel there told him was, “these kids are rough. You will have to watch your back in the hallways.”

That was enough to steer my husband clear of that job offer. And six months later a student shot another student in the hallway. The first people on the scene to stop the attack were the JROTC instructors.

Still, JROTC is a chance to make a difference. In addition to the officer’s firm warning about the violence in the hallway, he also reminded my husband that in many cases, the JROTC instructors were the only ones who were steering these kids to a future where they would grow and succeed.

They were there, he said, to grow a better future for the nation.

Want to know more about becoming a JROTC instructor when you retire?

Visit http://www.usarmyjrotc.com/home/xtesting for all the details.

Our neighbors have just a few weeks, and they are leaving the Navy.

They are finished with their time.  They are at the end of their contract.  The jig is up, as they say.

It’s kind of shocking to hear them talk about it.  To know they’re moving back to Pennsylvania and the home they’ve been renting out for years.  To hear them discussing schools for their kids and whether they need to sell one of their cars before or after they move back.

They’re both job hunting.  Selling their house here.  Garage-selling everything they don’t plan to take with them.  Talking to their children about moving just one more time.

I’m really happy for them.  They are excited for the next chapter.

But it has both my husband and I thinking about what we would do when our time with the Navy is over.

It’s hard to picture, honestly.

Being a military family isn’t just an outfit we put on every day.  It’s like an extra limb.

Every time someone asks me a question or sends me an invitation, I calculate in my head where my husband will be or won’t be.

We don’t follow a normal calendar.  We follow the deployment calendar the Navy changes constantly. 

 We are reliant on a grocery store that’s closed on Mondays.  You can never leave the house without seeing someone you know.

And we all speak a different, coded language, sometimes communicating with just a nod or a wink or a shrug that can mean the world.

But what about when we don’t?

What about when “How are you doing?” is just that, instead of code for “Your husband is deployed. Can I offer you some help?”

It will be a happy time, to move on and out of the military.  But I think it may be a little bewildering, too.

It’s losing part of our identity.  It’s who we’ve been for 10, 13, or 27 years.  It’s how we’ve put food on the table; it’s affected how we celebrate holidays.

It’s where we made friends and homes and memories.

It is, in essence, just a job.  But I think for most military families, it’s more than that.

It encompasses more of our lives.  It affects day-to-day happenings.  We wouldn’t live in Georgia or Connecticut or Hawaii if it weren’t for the Navy.

It’s not everything we are.  But it’s a huge thing.

And it’s going to be the missing limb for a while when we finally separate.

Sure, it’s exciting.  But it’s also a little scary, too.

“We don’t get a lot of those guys.”

That’s the response I hear over and over from veterans who fill the roster at our local VFW, American Legion and Disabled Veterans’ Association.

Those guys. Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans. Young members. All of the above.

After my husband retired it was a relief, at first, to empty my calendar of FRG meetings, luncheons and other spouse trappings that come with military life. Then, we moved. And I wasn’t really sure where the heck I was supposed to go to make friends.

Love them or hate them, those exhausting, sometimes drama-filled, always too long meetings were a good place to meet your new best friend. As retirees, we moved to a small town where everyone knew everyone, except for us, and that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. We were the odd man out.

So, we went to the local American Legion. And suddenly felt like we were attending our grandparent’s 75^th wedding anniversary. We were the token young family. We had the only kids under age 30. We were the only ones in the room under age 40. Uh oh.

Turns out this is the scene that is unfolding at veterans’ organizations across the nation. Last month The Washington Post reported that only 15 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans who were eligible to join the VFW have done so. The average age of a current member is 70.

Both the VFW and the American Legion have reported rapidly declining memberships. Each organization has lost 1 million members since the 1990s. And it seems the halls full of elderly gentlemen drinking, smoking and reminiscing is turning the younger generation of warriors away.

The Post article cites a growth in local service organizations and groups that plan outings and are active physically. Young veterans and their families, it seems, aren’t ready to sit and slow down. They want to return home and continue to build their communities, not sit and be thanked for their service.

I agree. We attended a summer barbeque at the local legion hall. It was nice. People were friendly. But, we were bored. Our kids were lonely. They were stuck sitting at a table. We were stuck sitting at a table. This seriously couldn’t be as good as it gets as retirees. 

So, what to do? Change.

As the nation ages, things change. The same is true for these organizations. The Post interviewed a former Army captain in Kansas who didn’t like what he saw at his local VFW. So, he recruited his friends to join, they ran for office at the hall, won and began to morph the programming and events to serve the needs of all veterans, young and old. Their attendance skyrocketed and retired families in that town now have a place to call their own.

We will keep attending our local veterans’ organizations, and doing what we can to help them welcome and serve young veterans. I urge you to do the same. These storied organizations have celebrated 100 years of service to our veterans. But they need to change with the time. To change, they need us, military families and veterans who can show them what the new generation needs.

Please visit your VFW or American Legion Hall this Veterans’ Day. Meet the men and women who have gone before us. Volunteer to help. Build bridges between the generations and show them that we can take the helm and drive these outstanding organizations into the next century.

Like most military families we’ve moved, a lot. Eight times in 15 years.

It is fair to say during many of those moves about a third of our boxes were never even opened. They simply sat in the garage, stacked, stored, dusty. Until they were shipped cross-country and placed in a new corner, in a different garage where they were stacked, stored and dusty until the process started all over again.

But this time is our last time. This time, we opened the boxes. It was like Christmas.

Things we forgot we even owned came spilling out. And for the first time in 15 years they were put away. Not in a corner. Not stuffed into a storage closet. They were put away, in a place where they belonged. In a place where they would stay. Forever.

Ok, maybe using the term forever is a bit of a stretch. But for the first time in my adult life I actually, completely unpacked.

Normally, we storm through those piles of boxes in less than a week, stuffing what we know we’ll use into bedroom closets, stashing what we know we will probably never touch into the nether reaches of the garage and then labeling those boxes of unknowns to hover in moving purgatory – out where they can be found in a pinch but still in a deep enough stack of boxes that we will seriously consider whether we really have to have it.

This time, we’ve been opening boxes for four months, at a pace of two boxes a day. The boxes are broken down and carted off. The paper inside no longer has to be folded nicely and saved for the next move. It’s all gone.

And the items inside, we actually dust them off, proudly look them over and find a place for them in our home where they belong, not just where they fit. When we stand back and look around our house it is not just where we live, but it is us.

Our garage has space for a car. An actual car is in my garage, not boxes.

And for the first time ever I feel like we live somewhere and are not simply stationed there. When people ask where I’m from, I don’t have to explain the long list of where I’ve lived. We finally belong to a place and it belongs to us.

Forever.

Yeah, it’s not a stretch. For the first time, we are somewhere forever, and I like it.

You know what is awesome about military retirement? We are nowhere near old enough to fit the profile of the typical retiree.

Young privates who check my military ID at the gate do a double take to look at the box marked : RET. I secretly say a silent 'thank you' to the universe for insuring that I do not yet look like a retiree caricature.

We have toddlers still not old enough for preschool. Other moms on the playground are jealous that as retirees, our schedules are no longer dictated by PCS, deployment or field exercises.

When many of our active duty neighbors head to work at o'dark thirty, we can roll over and wait for the much later alarm to ring in time for our kids to head to school.

And when snow and ice pelted our area, those in uniform still slogged their way onto base. We were allowed to huddle in our house with the rest of the community and wait for it all to melt.

Retiring young has perks.

Our kids are still kids. We have time to play with them. We still want to travel and explore and now we have time to do it. His career has been neatly tied up with a giant red ribbon which means after years of following him around and just sliding by, my career can take the lead. I get to decide where we move and what job I want, rather than take a job that is simply there. Meanwhile I will let him figure out school lunches.

But retiring young is also a problem.

We still have toddlers who need 18 years of schooling, new clothes, piano lesson and college.

We still have to work and earn substantial money, not just keep ourselves busy like many, much older retirees do. We have to work hard, probably for another 20 - 25 years to provide for our still very young family.

Our house is not our retirement home but merely our starter home which we are in the process of selling since it is officially too small. Our move to our new house is exhausting since that bill is paid by us now, not Uncle Sam.  

I can't imagine that any job is as demanding as the military but our friends' jokes about enjoying the quiet, golfing retirement are getting old. We're retired from one job, not from working.

Retirement is nice. It is nice to be free from the red tape and the heart ache and difficulties that come with military life. But I am looking forward to actual retirement. When in 20 years, after we've done the best we can and our new careers come to a graceful close, we can actually stop working.

When we don't even have to set the alarm.

When we never have to move into a new house again.

When we can call our friends and ask if they want to go golfing, on a weekday afternoon.

Military retirement is nice, but real retirement, that is a day I am really looking forward to.

Retirement, before age 40. Sweet, right? Military members who join at 18, or like my husband who joined at age 17, can enjoy the carefree life of retirement long before their civilian counterparts.

And for me as a spouse, it's pretty great. No more uniforms, no more deployment books. No more officers' wives dirty looks. The retirement package that the military offers its career service members cannot be beat in the civilian world, even with the recent changes made by Congress.

After 15 years of military marriage and all the red tape, rules and insanity caused by this military life, I was ready to go. I didn't realize, however, how unprepared I was to exit the rigor of Army life.

My husband left our last duty station in Hawaii three months before I did to take care of things on the mainland and prepare for our family's arrival. When he pulled up to the airport terminal to rescue us after 24 hours of traveling, his hair was touching his collar. No, it was below his collar. Unkempt. Uneven. His bangs covered his forehead.

His face was scruffy. He had the beginnings of a beard. His shirt was not tucked in.

He was parked in a no loading zone and dared the authority that wasn't there to tell him to move it. My by the books, strict, E-7 husband was breaking the rules.

There was no uniformed, lower enlisted in tow to help us drag our stacks of suitcases from the curb. There was no paperwork to hand off. No one knew we were there and frankly, no one cared.

At our new home, there was no TA-50 (military equipment) to stash trip over until someone finally stashed it in the hall closet. No one called to remind my husband of PT in the morning or make sure he had signed in.

Our move was quiet. It was lonely. I felt lost without the stack of paperwork that normally greets me at each new place. There were no built-in friends at the FRG calling to welcome us.

We were officially on our own. Retired. Free.

And I'm not quite sure what to do with myself.

I suddenly feel like I don't fit in anymore. At dinner at a local restaurant, we were asked, "Are you military?" Yes. No. Kind of. Used to be?

Younger troops at the gate eye my ID card suspiciously. I can no longer pass for a college student but their raised eyebrows clearly indicate that I don't fit their idea of what a retiree spouse should like either.

When I unpacked a decorative sign we carried for the last 10 years that exclaims "Home is Where the Army Sends Us" I'm not sure if I should hang it, stash it or donate it.

It seems the Army life we dreamed of someday leaving behind is a hard habit to break.