Finding harmony in family, finance & military life

Hooray our pay on the 15 of April will not be changed! I am so glad our government was at least able to come to a temporary agreement and keep our military families out of a financial mess. The threat however still lingers as our country gets deeper into debt with no real fix for the budget in sight. Did the idea of not getting your full pay scare you? While we knew it posed no immediate danger for us it sure got us thinking. Brent and I took a look at our budget and our savings and decided it was time to double our emergency fund. We already have about 6 months worth of expenses saved up and ready to use in case of an emergency. We started saving our emergency fund the minute we paid off our last debt other then the mortgage back in December 2009 and we have already had to dip into it once to replace our leaking and rotted out roof. For our family the magic number was $12,000 we knew that would cover our four walls for about 6 months easily. We were also sure it would cover any insu...

Well will we or won't we? That seems to be the circulating question with about a hundred different answers! One source says we will get paid just not on the 15th of April it will be posted on May 1st as back pay. Another source says we will receive half of our pay on the 15th of April and the rest will come after the budget is hashed out. Yet another source states only those in a combat zone will get any kind of pay on the 15th of April and someone else believes there will be no change to our pay at all.Some are also saying nothing will be affected until May. I do not claim to know which answer is right, frankly I don't think anyone knows which answer it is going to be at the moment. Right now I am just so thankful that we are able to live off of the pay we received on April 1st. We wrote up our budget so that our mortgage and all of our utilities along with our food budget and blow money were covered by what we get paid on the first. The give portion of our budget is also c...