Originally Posted by
nwaf16dude
FWIW... Deciding where to live depends a lot on what your intentions are with the military. If it's just a stopgap/backup income that you need for a year or two, stop reading. If you want to continue your mil career to a retirement or have some other desire to hang with it for an extended period of time, then I highly recommend living within easy driving distance of your mil job. If you don't, it will become increasingly hard to stick with it over the coming years, especially when you get to the point where you are losing money to do your mil duty. Much easier to stick with it if you are sleeping at home on the non-deployed nights you are doing mil stuff. Whatever you do, don't move to a location that requires a commute to both airline and mil. Thats a sure-fire plan for ending up in divorce court or the hospital, or both.
Originally Posted by
full of luv
Agree with this train of thought. Initially for the first decade, living where you can regularly drill will be more valuable than living in airline base as you will be able to manipulate your sked with mil leave when you need to. Once you've been at your unit for a bit, you'll become an IP (especially in the Herc) and you'll have opportunity to fly in the morning as a trainer or night but return home each day.
Until then, the Herc trips can be long which will eat into what you can give the company on a monthly basis but at the beginning of your career the military (Navy VR) will be a better option than the airline both QOL and pay wise.
After your done with the military then focus on airline QOL.
Aloha,
LUV
nwa and luv, great advice. You’ve both hit on many of the thoughts I’m hoping to be able to balance over the next decade. Wherever we end up (reserve unit and airline) our plan is to live local to the reserve unit for at least the first year or two. Hopefully pick up an IP qual, bum as much as the squadron will have me, maybe even pick up some active duty time. Once the income starts to get back to the active duty pay levels I’m at now, then we would decide where we want to go… stay local and involved with the unit, move back to Carolina and just do minimum VR drills, or just switch over to IRR and finish out retirement via NKO courses.
Either way, I feel like if you can afford it, DC gives the best QOL early on due to the close proximity to junior airline bases, as well as good QOL once we move away as it seems like CLT-DCA would be a pretty easy commute compared to PNS, JAX, or Norfolk/VA Beach.
nwa, the reason why I asked earlier about commuting from GSP is the “don’t commute to both jobs” rule. Living there would obviously require a commute to a VR job (again, CLT to DCA seems relatively easy), and my perception is that the 1.5-2.5 hour drive to CLT or ATL wouldn’t add that much stress if it made my wife happier to be near her sister instead of down in ATL. Would you consider that reasonable or am I being too optimistic?
Thanks for the feedback!