I could live in base housing and not receive this allotment at all. All utilities and house-care is free and all I would need to pay for is internet and renter's insurance. I could easily bike anywhere on base, including work, and all would be well, except I'd be wasting all that money away. There's some setbacks to this problem. My wife might have to commute the 30 miles to Town B if she can't find work on base and can't find a job in the other two tiny towns.
I could choose to live in Town B, which is more of a city and has a lot more things to do and offer, and assume about 1,043.57 miles of commuting to work every month, not counting any random recalls or situations I would have to come in for. So that's about $417 a month leaving me with only a bit over $700 a month to rent or buy a place and break even over living on base. I could bike to work potentially, but that's a lot of time spent biking after a long shift at work.
I could live in Town A, halfway to Town B and assume $222 in commuting costs, but now my wife is going to have to commute somewhere for work because there are no job opportunities here. So at a maximum I now have $900 to spend on rent/buying a house to break even, and prices in this town are significantly higher than the other two. Biking is a much higher possibility here.
The prospect of commuting 30 miles to work every day does not excite me, but neither does letting that allotment go to waste in base housing. I feel that I should go out and put that to work in a mortgage (totally at least $55,000 in four years) so it's doing some work for me instead of wasting it on base, but I'm just not sure if it's worth it.
Any advice? :(
You seem to be interested in finding your spouse a job working at someone else's company. Can she do her own entrepreneurial work with crafts or sales? Can she start a blog or a website with products? Can she tackle remote work (from home) as a call center employee or doing freelance work? Can she volunteer at the base family support center or fitness center or tours/tickets office for a few months and turn that into an entry-level job?
She's not the first military spouse to face these challenges, and she can do better than settling for a minimum-wage job with a long commute.
Do you have to buy a house? You could choose to rent in town and bank the rest of the housing allowance into the stock market or even into CDs.
Otherwise, if you buy a home then over a four-year period you're hoping for at least two things to go right:
1. Buy and sell a highly illiquid asset without paying 6% transaction fees on at least one sale, in an area that may or may not be in demand.
2. Find tenants (in these lovely towns) who will pay your landlord costs of carrying the rental property (those costs are a lot higher than your mortgage payment).
3. Find a place that costs less to own than to rent (after adding maintenance, repairs, property taxes, and homeowner insurance).
A surprise PCS could happen, but in my occupation it's very rare to get orders without putting in for them, so if I wanted to stay here for all 4 years it's almost guaranteed.
I have to admit, I nearly snorted coffee on my keyboard at this comment. You are in the U.S. military, right?
I guess that's one more thing you'd have to count on going right during a four-year period.
However making a profit in real estate in even four years requires some extraordinary MrMoneyMustache-class home-rehab sweat-equity skills on your part, or else you'd have to own property in a rapidly-growing community. You need to stop waving around your housing allowance and do the research on the 20 or so properties in your area that you could acquire at a discount and turn into a profit for your labor. If your spouse is seeking a job, maybe she'd be interested in construction rehab or a realtor's license.
All of this may work out great for you, but you should also consider the very real impact that the financial risks could wreak upon your net worth:
http://the-military-guide.com/2015/01/01/dont-buy-home-active-duty/It's hard to say that the profits of short-term home ownership would compensate you for the very real risks that you're contemplating.
For the record, my husband is military in hawaii (bah $4,000) and we pay $2550 in rent for an upstairs apt. Holy hawaii...
We're renting out a 4BR/2BA single-level home for $2900/month but trying to decide when to break the news to the tenants that it's going up to $3000/month. Whether or not we "have enough", we have to run that property like a business.