As many of you may remember, we learned about our surprise July 2017 move to Iowa in the middle of March 2017. That gave us just 3.5 months to prepare and save money for our move. Knowing we would be doing a full DITY (do-it-yourself) move and that we would also be living in a civilian area and need to pay rental deposits, we saved every single penny we could from that day we learned of the move until we were finally settled into our new house. I am so, so glad we did, because this PCS (our first one as a married couple) proved to be more expensive than either one of us were prepared for!
Total Money Saved For PCS- $4,942.86
I had set a goal of saving $5,000 for the move, but thanks to an unexpected yet necessary truck repair, we didn’t quite meet that goal. This money was saved from my department store paychecks and cutting expenses in our regular budget (for instance, reducing our grocery budget since we were eating all of our pantry stock.) We did have to tap into our emergency fund to cover our rental home deposits, but thankfully, we were able to replenish that fund fairly quickly!
Note: I tracked our budget on a simple Excel spreadsheet with “guesstimates” of what I thought we would spend in each category and then tallied up the total amount as we spent it. Since we needed to keep receipts for our reimbursement pay anyway, it honestly wasn’t too difficult to track everything!
Expenses:
Packing supplies- $189.84
Moving truck- $990.36
Weigh ticket fees- $44.00
Gasoline in moving truck + Andy’s truck- $270.53
Food (for 4 weeks, both during hotel stay during pTDY and while we lived in the camper)- $473.08
Hotel (while en route)- $481.36
Hotel costs for 2 weeks in Iowa (for pTDY)- $1,138
In-processing in Minneapolis (hotel and gasoline)- $197.68
Living in camper for 2 weeks (cost for renting camping spot and the rental truck + gas for Dad to bring it to us)- $810.00
Rental home deposits- $2,025.00
Storage unit (we had to put our things in storage since we didn’t have a house prior to moving)- $639.81
Moving truck (to get belongings out of storage)- $97.00
Miscellaneous (pet licenses, home supplies, etc.)- $226.34
Total Spent- $8,056.08
Income:
Dislocation Allowance- $2,157.88
Incentive Pay for doing a DITY move- $3,537.36
Monetary Allowance in Lieu of Transportation (aka “gas money”)- $228.82
Per Diem (hotel and food allowance while traveling from Knox to Mason City)- $398.41
Permissive TDY hotel pay (2 weeks in hotel)- $1,417.40
Total Income- $7,739.87
Looking at the basic sums, we lost about $316 on our move. However, there were a few factors at play. We had to pay out of pocket for our first month’s rent in our new home, as it took a bit of time for our BAH to switch from auto-pay for Fort Knox housing to direct-deposited to our checking account for paying a civilian landlord in Mason City. We also had to cover a rental deposit, which we did not have to do when we lived on-post; we should get back most of our deposit when we move out of the house. Oddly enough, about $200 of expenses were incurred during in-processing at Battalion (which is 2 hours away from where we live) but we were not approved for reimbursement for the mandatory trip to The Cities. One of the quirks of being on a remote military assignment, I suppose.
Why We Didn’t Lose Money By Doing a DITY Move
If you look at the amounts above, it appears that we lost money on the move. However, let’s look solely at the expenses for our do-it-yourself move:
Cardboard boxes and packing paper- $0 (thank you again, Alex!)
Other packing supplies- $189.84
Moving truck- $990.36
Weight ticket fees- $44.00
Gasoline in moving truck + Andy’s truck- $270.53
Storage unit- $639.81
Moving truck (to get belongings out of storage)- $97.00
Total- $2,241.54
Our incentive pay for moving ourselves was a total of $3,537.36. So, we made a total of $1,295.82 simply by moving our own things. This does not include the other expenses/income from our move, because we would have had those expenses/income regardless of whether we moved our own things or let the Army movers move them. Also, we had exactly ZERO things break on our DITY move. Let me repeat that again: we did not have a single thing break during our move! That alone made the hard work of a DITY move worth it.
What did we learn from our DITY move?
1: Moving is hard work.
That’s kind-of a “duh”, but really. It was a lot of sweat equity for our DITY move! We’re not sure if we will go the full DITY route again, a partial DITY, or a combination of the two where we drive our own moving truck but hire movers to put the belongings in the truck. Thankfully, we have 2.5 years before we need to figure that out! (When I asked Andy what he learned, he said “I’m getting too old to do this myself.”)
2: We’ll most likely always be out of pocket on some moving-related expense.
Y’all, moving is expensive! We did the “cheap” route by living out of my father-in-law’s camper for 2 weeks, but it was still more expensive than either of us anticipated. Since we own pets, we were out of pocket on all pet-related expenses, such as the car harness for to safely transport Lily, pet deposits at the hotels, pet licenses in our new city, a new litterbox for Gracie that would fit in her cat carrier, etc. Either way you slice it, it’s just so expensive to move every few years, both for us as a couple and for the government paying for military families to move.
3: Save up money far in advance for a military move!
I honestly thought we had another year before we would be moving out of Kentucky, but we weren’t so fortunate. Thankfully, we were able to adjust our budget to cash-flow the move, but what if we weren’t able to? Although Andy does have a GTC (government travel card), there are still some expenses that we wouldn’t be able to charge on the GTC (like our pet expenses). I can’t imagine how our financial situation would be if we weren’t able to cash-flow this move.
In the future, we plan to save at least $10,000 aside for any future CONUS PCSes, and more if we were to go OCONUS. Our hope is that this PCS Fund would be separate from our regular emergency fund. Thankfully, being debt-free will make it easier to save!
Related: Why We Did a Full DITY/PPM Move
Military families: do you prefer to do DITY or PPM moves?
How much money do you save up for a move?