Originally Posted by
Pilot553
taking advantage of USERRA and having 5 years to do so before going back to the legacy and maintaining my seniority.
Don't worry about the five year limit, that's a common fallacy and will not apply to you during your initial training and follow-on orders.
There are countless exemptions to the five-year rule and the only folks who really ever get into that clock are volunteering for mil duty they really didn't have to do.
None of your mandatory duty, including training, drills, annual training, involuntary deployments etc ever counts against the five years. You can do a full career, retire as a Col, and never touch a day of it, certainly never get close to endangering your civilian employment.
Originally Posted by
Pilot553
With that said, the biggest hurdle is from a financial standpoint. Most if not all guard units want you to stay on after your approximately 2 years of training for at least 2 more so you can become a lead/instructor pilot and give back to the unit in that capacity. It sounds like the compensation during these years is approximately an $80k per year salary.
Make sure you're looking at everything OTHER than base pay... there are a lot of tax free allowances, plus flight pay which will push your net pay way above what you might think just by googling the pay chart. Research how it all works if you haven't already.
It's not going to be legacy pay (year 2+) but it's probably not as bad you think.