Military Nesties
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Savings tips
We are trying to learn how to save and get caught up. We just started getting full BAH and BAS and we have extra every pay. I would like to know if anyone has any tips they would like to share on saving?
TIA 
Re: Savings tips
Pay yourself before any other bills. In other words, if you're able to save X amount of dollars, set up an automatic transfer every month or paycheck to transfer that amount into a savings account.
You can also take a hard look at your budget and see what you'd be willing to cut out. We're in the process right now of cutting our cable/internet/phone bills down to the bare minimum and we're thinking of switching to pre-paid cell phones.
Does your husband contribute to a TSP? It's so much easier to get ahead with retirement savings when you do it at a young age. It wouldn't hurt for you to have your own Roth IRA so you can start saving for retirement too, just in case something should prevent you and your husband from sharing his retirement, even if it's smaller than his contribution.
In the long run, saving for retirement is the absolute best thing you can do for your family.
We only pay for our grocery trips with our debit card...we get 50 bucks a week each in cash to spend, and after that, you're stuck eating meals at home or no more purchasing videos or movies.
My husband was using his debit card upwards of 100 times a month and it was killing us budget wise. He picked the $50 bucks number so it was something he felt comfortable with. We usually end up having $700 at the end of the month in addition to the "automatic savings" we deduct at the beginning of the month because we stick to this $50 of spending money a week. That goes to help pay off wedding bills or an extra car payment or something, just to help us get ahead.
Thrift Savings Plan! It's a retirement account for federal employees. https://www.tsp.gov/index.shtml
Have you ever heard of Smart Couples Finish Rich? It's a book by David Bach and there's a chart in there that shows how interest compounds over time, so by starting to save for a retirement at a younger age and actually investing LESS money, a person ends up with more money at the end than a person who invested MORE money when they were 30. I'm trying to find a similar chart online for you, but I make no guarantees.
http://mindyourfinances.com/money-management/savings/081104-04
Definitely look into TSP and a Roth IRA. Both are tax-advantageous, too, so the money grows and you pay fewer taxes (TSP is pre-tax dollars, which lowers your tax burden; Roth IRAs, I believe, grow tax free).
Once you've set up your retirement contributions, you should also save cash automatically each month. What we did last year when H promoted is automatically put the extra pay in our cash savings. We don't miss it, because we never saw it. Same thing when I got a raise. Our BAH went up slightly and with the new 2012 pay, we end up with ~$100 extra a month-- that money goes straight to savings, too.
For us, it's harder to reach our savings goals if we just wait to have money left over at the end of the month. We usually do have something left over, so we transfer that to cash savings, too, but one way we guarantee we save is by maxing out our retirement contributions and then paying ourselves with automatic transfers. We set up long term savings (which we haven't ever touched, thankfully) and short term savings (which we use for emergencies, like when we needed a new battery in a car, or when our cat got injured and we had a high vet bill). When short term savings gets above a certain amount, we transfer to long-term savings or to one of our other savings accounts (we save for things like new furniture or travel home, things like that).