Being a member of the military is, in many ways, choosing a career that offers stability and security. There are many wonderful benefits that the Armed Forces offers its soldiers. There are also some insecurities, such as the chance that you are going to get called to duty abroad, often with very little forewarning.
Getting the notice that you are going to be deployed with your military unit requires you to do some thinking and planning ahead. Hopefully, you have thought about this possibility and done some planning ahead of time, but if you are like many people, you may not have. One of the very important things that you are going to need to have in order is your finances. As much as you may wish that your bills would just wait while you’re gone, they won’t, so you must have a plan for paying them prior to your departure.
Thanks to the wonderful advances in technology, many bills can be paid online, or even through a cell phone. There are many deployments, however, that are going to have you in places where you may not have regular access to technology like you do at home. If you are heading into battle, you may not have the time or inclination to worry about such mundane matters, either. For these reasons, it is really best to have a back-up plan in line.
Many of your bills will be able to be withdrawn directly from your checking account. This makes things fairly simple as long as you ensure that the date your military pay is going in is on schedule with the dates that your payments are coming out. If you aren’t already using automatic bill pay, call and see which of your bills offer this service and get it set up.
For those bills that you can’t have automatically withdrawn from your bank, you will need to come up with something else. Depending on international mail is not the way to go when it can be avoided. If you have someone that you trust, who is dependable, and who will be staying home, give him or her a calendar with the dates of each bill that needs to be mailed out. Write out several months (at least) worth of checks and have them in envelopes, stamped, addressed, and ready to go. Put them in order with sticky notes for the mailing date on each. This will make it easy for the person doing you this facor and it will help him or her to avoid errors.
It is a good idea, if you are being deployed, to assign someone power-of-attorney for you. This will need to be someone that you trust entirely as he or she will be able to make any decision that needs to be made in your absence. He or she will be acting essentially as if he or she were you.
Leaving on a military deployment means that you will be away, but that life at home will still carry on as usual. There are things that you will need to do to prepare for your time away. Getting your finances in order is just one of these things, but having this done will help to ensure that your stress while deployed will have one less aspect.