My Life As A Military Spouse: December 2010

2010/12/18

Money Monday (on Saturday)

This will be the last posting of 'Money Monday' for 2010. See you in 2011.

Where to find Super Saturday deals

Many Happy (Holiday Purchase) Returns

Flexible Spending Accounts About to Get Less Flexible

How To Buy Life Insurance

Flying On A Budget

2011 Investment Guide

Facial Recognition Is Coming To Facebook

Shady Landlord Schemes And How To Fight Back

More Interaction In Online Courses Isn’t Always Better

Bad College Advice - the Undeclared Major

Should You Do A Roth IRA Conversion Now?

PayPal Wants You To Ditch Your Wallet

The Hidden Cost of Going Green

Are You Buying Into a Good Neighborhood?

Car Tech On the Cheap

Fed's New Debit-Card Fee Rules Hit Hard; Issuers Howl

Debt Settlement Companies: How to Tell The Good From The Bad

Airfares Rise by $10 Round Trip, and Steeper Increases Are Circling

Three Ways You're Making Yourself Vulnerable to Cyber Crime

Worker Background Checks Rise -- and So Do Errors

The New Migrant Workers: Living on the Road in RVs, Working Temp Jobs

The Best Times to Buy a Car in 2010 and 2011

13M get unexpected tax bill from Obama tax credit

Five steps to becoming debt-free

What Do Rising Interest Rates Mean for the Economy?

Tax Deal: What's in It for You?

Energy Wasters in Your Home

2010 Tax Changes You Need to Know

IRS audits jump by 11 percent; wealthiest targeted

5 Reasons Using a Debit Card is Dangerous

Five ways to prevent identity theft online

Top 10 States People Are Fleeing

Gold-dispensing ATM debuts in the U.S.

Renting clothes gets sort of chic

MOBILE BROADBAND THE NEXT BIG HACKING RISK?

9 Things That Make Your Property Taxes Rise

iPhone and Android Apps Breach Privacy

Money mistakes that could cripple you

Exquisite boutique hotels under $150

16 sites that will deliver by Christmas

Labels: budget friendly

2010/12/16

Free Shipping Day

FreeShippingDay.com

All Free Shipping Day offers will be revealed on this website at 12:00am EST on Friday, December 17, 2010.Over 60% of participating merchants are offering free shipping on all orders.

Free Shipping Day Is Friday Dec. 17!

Guaranteed Christmas Eve delivery. To top that off, more than half the retailers participating -- some 60% -- are offering free shipping with no minimums. The rest have minimums or other qualifications to get free shipping.

How to Make the Most of Free Shipping Day

Keep in mind that Free Shipping Day is only the last day for standard shipping before Christmas, not all shipping. Expedited shipping will still be available all the way up to December 22.

2011 BAH Rates...

Can be found here.

Labels: 2011 BAH Rates

2010/12/13

Money Monday

Tax Time Cometh

Banks with $0 ATM fees

How much should you tip?

Holiday dilemma: Cash or card

Beware $90 oil

3 Tips to Help Sell Your Home

The Unsolved Estate-Tax Problem

10 Things Gas Stations Won't Tell You

What to Do With a Payroll Tax Cut

Top 5 Apps for Holiday Shopping

Social Security Payback Option Eliminated

A procrastinator's guide to holiday gifts

Sneaky way credit cards hurt credit scores

How Obama tax cut affects Social Security

Dodging This Year's Gift-Delivery Lag

Preparing Your Finances For a Deployment

Federal Judge to Rule on Health Law's Constitutionality

How do you sell a house in this market? By being really creative.

The Internet knows what Poppy Harlow keeps private

Labels: budget friendly

2010/12/09

Operation Finally Home

Wounded Soldier Surprised With Brand New Home

2011 Scholarships for Military Children program

Scholarships for Military Children Program opens

As families and friends come together to celebrate their favorite winter holidays, it's also time for parents to remind students to apply for the 2011 Scholarships for Military Children program.

Scholarship applications will be available Dec. 7 in commissaries worldwide and online – choose the "News & Info" tab above and then the "Scholarship Info" tab. Applications are also available on www.militaryscholar.org.

Since the program was announced in 2000, it has awarded $8.3 million in scholarships to more than 5,400 children of service members.

"The Scholarships for Military Children program was created to recognize the contributions of military families to the readiness of the fighting force," said the Defense Commissary Agency's Acting Director and CEO Thomas E. Milks. "It also celebrates our role in the military community, as the scholarships are awarded annually through each commissary operated by DeCA."

Only dependent, unmarried children of active-duty service members, reservists, guardsmen, retirees, or survivors of service members who died on active duty or while receiving military retired pay, may apply for a scholarship. Applicants must also be younger than 21, or 23 if enrolled as a full-time student at a college or university. Eligibility is determined using the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System database. Applicants should ensure they, as well as their sponsor, are enrolled in the DEERS database and have a current military ID card. An applicant must be planning to attend, or already be attending, an accredited college or university, full time in the fall of 2011 or be enrolled in a program of studies designed to transfer directly into a four-year program.

Applicants must also submit an essay on the following topic that answers the question: "Our nation has a goal of improving health and wellness. What are your ideas and, more importantly, how do you propose to put these ideas into action in your local community?" Applications must be turned in to a commissary by close of business Feb. 22, 2011. At least one scholarship will be awarded at every commissary with qualified applicants.

Scholarship awards will be based on funds available, but the scholarship program anticipates awards of at least $1,500. If there are no eligible applicants from a particular commissary, the funds designated for that commissary will be awarded as an additional scholarship at another store.

Scholarship Managers, a national, nonprofit, scholarship-management services organization, manages and awards these military scholarships. If you have any questions about the scholarship program application, call Scholarship Managers at 856-616-9311 or email.

Commissary vendors, manufacturers, brokers, suppliers and the general public donate money to the program, and every dollar donated goes directly to funding the scholarships.

Thursday Smile

2010/12/08

Lessons Learned While Attending Sporting Events

In the last few weeks we have taken our family to a few sporting events. These events have given our family a plethora of learning experiences.

My children play various sports and we adults are frequently coaches. My husband and I played a variety of sports in our day. This does not mean that we know everything about each sport. We do train, educate ourselves and try very hard.

Within the sporting events that we have frequented as of late - collegiate and professional - what have I learned?

That many people wish they could be coaches and/or players at one or both of those levels and possibly get paid for it.

Instead they pay to attend events where they can sit in the stands and yell at the players, coaches and referees. They tell them how horrible and wrong they are. This leads to them making fools of themselves, showing how much they truly don't know about the given sport and getting shown in the stands up by an eight year old who does understand the rules.

Those who can't get paid to coach/play will apparently pay just to be able to coach from the stands. That is what I learned.

My children learned patience and how to politely share their voices. They also learned that many people are totally off base within their knowledge and understanding of sports they propose to love so much.

My eight year old says that they should do more research before opening their mouths. That is MY child and I could not agree with him more!

Life lessons appear everyday!

2010/12/06

AKO to close for family members. GTSY will replace it.

New site coming for those without CACs

Army Knowledge Online has weaknesses, officials with the system acknowledge, and said new changes will make the Web portal faster, its search more agile and social networking functions more accessible through an entirely new Army portal called GTSY.

The Army plans to block access to AKO for all but Common Access Card holders, and provide friends, family and retirees — who are typically not eligible for CACs — with password access to GTSY, pronounced “gutsy.”

The Army personnel (G-1) program is set to launch www.gtsy.com early next year.

By December 2011, AKO and 600 other Army sites must be accessible only through the use of military-issued CACs and CAC readers, according to a Pentagon-level policy directive. The password and security question combination used today will no longer function, officials said.

This move is meant to allow only the Army’s active work force to have access to information considered “For Official Use Only,” said Joel Robinson, AKO chief of security. AKO will remain an active work tool, and GTSY is envisioned as the non-FOUO site for socializing and networking among soldiers, friends, family and retirees.
“We’re going to split AKO into two communities,” said Col. Earl Noble, head of AKO’s parent agency Network Enterprise Management. “Non-CAC holders will still have that non-FOUO place to socialize that we promised people they can do. So, you’re actually gaining capability, because GTSY is way beyond what we have today.”

GTSY will be accessed via password, without security questions. It will work along some of the same principals as Facebook. In addition, it will deliver Army messages and an Army-specific marketplace for its users like Craigslist.

“It used to be that you go to the PX and look at bulletin boards, but we’re in the 21st century,” Kenneth Fritzsche, AKO product director, said of GTSY’s marketplace.

“When you’re getting ready to move, you can sell stuff at Fort Belvoir, and when you get to Fort Bragg, you can buy stuff from people moving from Fort Bragg.”

Officials acknowledged that AKO is slow, overly secure and difficult to search, in answer to soldiers polled by Army Times who criticized the system. Noble said he was aware of issues raised in the Nov. 29 issue of Army Times.

“Nothing I read in that article was new to me because we always try to respond and improve things, and we need that feedback if we’re going to get better,” he said.

Efforts are underway to improve AKO, and soldiers should soon see better search capability, speed and storage capacity, officials said.

Plans include replacing 180 aging servers at the Fort Belvoir, Va., data center and a secret backup facility with 124 new blade servers, said Mike Bridges, AKO’s chief engineer. The new servers will be smaller, more power-efficient, and contain three times the computing power and five times the memory.

Bridges said AKO is also working on plans to provide all e-mail accounts with 1 gigabyte of storage.

With the new servers and AKO’s efforts with 9th Signal Command to upgrade Army networks, AKO users should soon expect to see a difference, Bridges said.

“We’ll be able to increase capability on search, we’ll have more search-engine servers up and running, there’s more storage, and the users will see better response times,” he said.

The Army is working on standardizing its computer equipment and consolidating networks. There are 147 installations with their own sub-networks, and making connections between these sub-networks, particularly with Army security, can be complicated, inefficient and slow, said Bridges.

“There is a speed issue, but it’s not just AKO, it’s the network,” Bridges said. “We’re working with Army and DoD networking to provide a better service to the soldiers.”

AKO officials said improvements have been slow in coming because the panel that governs AKO requirements has not been convened in more than a year. Also, the Army Chief Information Office/G-6, which chairs the board, has most recently funded the program at $67 million, the minimum, they said. (Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson retired as CIO in November and his deputy, Mike Kreiger, is acting CIO.)

“That’s part of the user frustration, that they’re not seeing a lot of changes on AKO, primarily because we’re not receiving a lot of requirements,” Fritzsche said. “The G-6 has funded us at the ‘barely-keep-the-lights-on level,’ as opposed to the ‘let’s-do-some-new-and-cool-stuff’ level.”

A switch to CAC-only access would likely trigger more use of CAC readers, the peripheral that connects CACs to computers. Asked how AKO would handle the influx of related technical support issues, Noble said he expects the contractors at the Army’s enterprise service desk “to handle any technical question people have.”

2010/12/05

Money Monday

10 mistakes people make with heat

10 Things Customer Service Reps Want to Tell You

7 Tips For Avoiding Shipping Costs When Shopping Online

6 Alternate Uses for Your Freezer

5 hidden costs of holiday shopping

15 Sites to Help You Find Amazing Holiday Deals

6 Tips to Make a Case for Property Tax Cut

Student's warning about massive debt

Educating Student-Loan Co-signers

Make this move now to avoid a tax penalty

10 of the best Christmas shopping deals

10 products that pay for themselves

Year-end car buying traps to avoid

Rising Oil Prices Fuels Debate

Foreclosure freeze coming for the holidays

True cost of filling up a plug-in car

Gen Y's recession lessons

Skip Restaurants for a Month, Save Over $500

25 Alternative Uses for Rubbing Alcohol

Budget Friendly Card Ideas

When Life Insurance is Suddendly Canceled

Tyes of Sellers Who Don't Have to Disclose Home's Flaws

What You Need to Know About Gift Cards

IPhone Users Falling Prey to Phishing

How to Find the Best Christmas Tree Prices

New Credit Scoring Rules to Make Qualifying for Loans Tougher in 2011

6 cliches that kill your cash

Cut your commuting costs

Tips for paying down your student loans

10 gadgets that wage war on winter

4 Years of College? Guess Again

Winter Comfort Foods on a Shoestring

How to Boost Your Social Security Benefits

How to Trim Costs, Save $500 By January

How to Get Your Cell Phone Bill Under Control

Holiday Gifts for Your Furry Friends

Dropout Rates Have Colleges Scrambling

How to Protect Yourself from a Potentially Deadly Rental Car

Best Ways to Call Home From Europe

Looking for Online Coupon Codes? Click Here

Six ways everyday wisdom can cost you

Year-End Financial Housekeeping

Weighing a Custodial Account for Your Kid

3 New Ways to Save on Gas

The Truth About a $25 Sweater

10 Things Your Landlord Won't Tell You

Do Retailers Inflate Their Discounts?

Understanding Your First Military Pay

Ditch Debt, Boost Credit Scores

What Is Income Tax Withholding and Why You Want To Get It Right

Labels: budget friendly

2010/12/04

AAFES Shopping

AAFES offers holiday deals this weekend

If you’re planning holiday shopping this weekend, here’s some intel on deals at your local Army and Air Force Exchange, where specials will be offered on jewelry, clothing, shoes and certain handbags.

• Saturday: Get 40 percent off clearance priced men’s women’s and children’s clothing, shoes, men’s belts and certain handbags — worldwide, according to AAFES officials.

• Sunday: Get 40 percent off regular priced clothing and select handbags. In addition, diamond jewelry will be 15 percent off, with an additional 10 percent discount when you use your Military Star card. But check with your local store, because the specials will only be offered in a two-hour window specific to each store. These specials will be available in all AAFES stores in the continental United States, and in certain stores elsewhere around the world.

Authorized shoppers — Navy, Marine Corps, Army, Air Force, Coast Guard, active-duty, National Guard, reserve, retired and families — can find store locations, contact information, and upcoming specials by visiting AAFES online. Scroll down to the bar with “Your Exchange.”

As always, do some comparison shopping, online and at other stores, before you head out.