 what's happening guys so the fan comments have gotten so good that i've decided to make a new segment called the friendly fan comment of the day all right so i can't wait to hear some uh positive feedback um desperate to hear some praise and validation from you guys let's see what we have here our first fan friendly comment of the day is going to be from haji i didn't know what brought me here but here it goes idiot thank you haji i didn't know what brought you here either but thanks for spreading the positivity so i predicted this video is probably going to get a lot of friendly comments as well today we're going to be talking about from a personal finance perspective whether joining the military or military pay is worth it okay so i got a lot of requests on military jobs and joining the military military pay all that sort of thing and so i decided to make a video on it now here's my disclaimer all right i'm putting this right at the beginning so that everybody hears it first of all i have a lot of respect for anybody who joins the military thank you for everything that you do with that being said you should not go into the military for the money period however you should know what you're getting yourself into and have a good financial plan going in and that's what this video is all about to educate and inform you so that you can make the best possible decision for your future and this is a personal finance channel so i'm going to be talking about things from a personal finance perspective okay i said it right there that's the end of the disclaimer i know i'm still gonna get a ton of friendly comments out there from the glue eaters but oh well by the way guys this is one of the toughest videos i've ever had to research there's a ton of research that went into this took a ridiculous amount of time i think i've spent about 10 hours writing the scripts for this one doing the research and writing these scripts for some of these videos can sometimes take like five to ten hours so please always make sure to gently tap the like button if you're not a glue eater and also to just show your appreciation for all of my hard work so for part one i'm basically just going to set the stage for everything else i'm going to be talking about the differences in the different military branches now these are going to be generalizations okay i'm going to be generalizing a lot of the branches but i think most people who watch this are going to agree with me on a lot of these things actually being true so generally speaking we're going to start with the navy you're going to get stationed either on a coast or you're going to be on a ship same goes with the coast guard and the navy you're going to have a decent quality of life it's not going to be as good as you'd get in the air force and it's not going to be as bad as the army or if you're going to be in the marines which yes i know marines is a part of the navy but i'm going to do those two separately marine quality of life is going to be much worse than the rest of the navy generally speaking in the navy the barracks and the lodging facilities are going to be nicer and just overall better than in the army and the navy can be great for you if you want to travel the world because you're going to be able to go all across the world on ships now the second one i'm going to talk about is the air force now the air force is going to generally speaking have much better locations than something like the army most of them are going to be very close to big cities and places where you just have a lot more to do now obviously if you love flying airplanes all that sort of thing the air force is probably going to be the best choice for you out of all of the different branches the quality of life is probably going to be the best in the air force now i know that quality of life is highly subjective different people might have complete opposite ideas of what a good quality of life is going to be but the housing is really nice in the air force there's a lot of desk jobs so you're not going to be spending nearly as much time outside there's going to be less chances of you getting injured less physical work you'll also likely spend a lot more time at home and around your family than a lot of the other branches and even if you are deployed you're probably going to stay at an air force base which isn't going to be nearly as bad as some of the other bases that you would stay at in the army or the navy to be honest with you most people say the air force bases are very similar to just being at home most of the time you're not going to be in danger zones or around a lot of action now the army is the third major one that i'm going to talk about there are many army based locations that are not in big cities and not only that but they're not even close to a big city many of them are out in the middle of nowhere you will adjust to this desert they like doing this because rural locations are perfect for training people in combat situations quality of life is subjective but generally speaking out of the big three army navy air force the army is going to have the worst army lodges army barracks are not going to be the nicest to stay at there's a very good chance that you're going to get deployed where the quality of life is going to be even worse however if you're someone who really likes camping you really like being outside doing physical labor it could be that the army has the best quality of life out of all of them some people hate desk jobs they would rather do just about anything than sit at a desk and so for some people the air force is going to have the worst quality of life this truly is subjective so it's going to be different from person to person now pay across the different branches is super easy and they make it that way on purpose although the ranks might be called something different they're all approximately equal and they're going to get paid exactly the same no matter which branch that you're in i'm going to leave some links in the description about all this stuff that i talk about but there's a link that you can go to to figure out exactly how much you'd get paid and it'll basically lead to this table that i'll have pop up on the screen right now now with that being said there are different specialties that can get paid more so if you know you're going to go into the military and you know what specialty you want to be you absolutely know 100 that's what you're going for you can do your research and look up the different branches to see which one gives you the best opportunities and i'll get a little bit more into that later on in the video now part two of this video now that you understand the different branches of the military which of course there's more than that but those are the three main ones is going to have to do with enlisted versus officer pay now an excellent resource that i found while i was researching this video for anything that has to do with the military is this website called life is a special operation they also have a youtube channel so chris runs this business and he was a special operations officer for over 20 years in the military he provides valuable information on just the military in general as well as military pay and different careers that you can go into and all that sort of thing i think he has an excellent website awesome awesome resource i'll make sure to link his channel down in the description i really enjoyed watching his content while i was doing the research for this video now pay is going to vary greatly depending on your rank but for most people it's going to be organized as either e1 through e9 for enlisted or o1 through o10 for officers e1 which is the lowest rank is going to start off making around 1600 a month o1 which is the lowest rank for officers is going to start off making double that at $3200 a month now for the sake of time i won't go into warrant officers in this video even though my dad was a warrant officer i'm not going to really go into that because that makes things a lot more complicated most people go in as either officer or enlisted but if you go in as a warrant officer that is another route that you can take that's w1 through w5 now when you compare a 20 year career of an enlisted soldier versus a 20 year career of an officer as you can imagine the pay is going to be completely different now if you didn't know this after serving 20 years in the military you get access to retirement pay where you basically get paid a certain amount every single month no matter what you're doing and i'll touch on this a little bit later on in the video so an enlisted soldier in general would make around 848 thousand dollars assuming he retired as an e8 30 years of retirement pay would add up to around 761 thousand dollars so the total would be about 1.6 million dollars for about 20 years of work officers on the other hand during their 20 years would make about 1.5 million plus another 1.3 million for 30 years of retirement pay this would add up to 2.8 million dollars for 20 years of work now this isn't counting some of the retirement benefits that i'm going to talk about later in the video it also doesn't count the fact that most people after retiring from the military will get themselves a good civilian job in fact it will help you get a really good job when you retire because there's a lot of careers out there that prefer people who are veterans so most of the time people who come out of the military either get a government job get a normal job with a corporation or they'll just start their own business so they'll end up making a heck of a lot more than i'm showing in this video but if you want a full career in the military meaning you want to be in at least 20 years and cash is your only consideration you're going to want to become an officer generally speaking officers are going to have better quality of life and they're also going to have more autonomy so what many people do is they enter as an enlisted person they learn certain skills in the military that are going to lead to them getting a really good job once they get out of the military then after a few years they've learned that valuable skill they leave the military and then they get a civilian job that pays really well so depending on the career that you go into this could end up being much more profitable than becoming an officer for 20 years so a friend of mine that i spoke to when i was doing the research for this video actually did that in the navy he trained in the navy as a reactor operator on submarines and then after he got out he immediately got a civilian job making six figures a year another friend of mine that i talked to when i was making this video is a pharmacist and he decided to go the officer route so like i talked about before there are special incentives that they give to people who go into the military and they become you know a pharmacist or a doctor or some other type of career that would generally speaking pay a lot more than what you get paid in the military this is basically to incentivize specialists to join the military now on top of that a lot of them will help you pay off your student loans and there's a bunch of other programs and discounts and all kinds of different perks that you can sign up for now for what it's worth i know i'm kind of comparing apples to oranges here but my friend who's the officer tells me that he works about 40 hours a week and he has a really good quality of life my friend that was enlisted told me he would routinely do 80 90 plus hour work weeks and the quality of life was not very good sometimes it was decent but a lot of the time it wasn't very good so again this kind of just goes back to the specialty that you're going for as well as your just overall life goals it's always best to have a plan and be intentional with your actions because it'll help you to make better decisions for your future now i always recommend on this channel looking up different professions like figuring out which ones you actually want to go for and then reverse engineering the process that you're going to have to take in order to get there for instance there are many professions in the military that will essentially pay you to learn extremely valuable skills then once you spend a few years doing that you know what you're doing you can get yourself a very good job outside of the military so even though directly speaking the pay in the military as an enlisted man wouldn't be that good once you get out of the military indirectly it will lead to you making a really good amount of money part three of this video is going to be all about the allowances entitlements and bonuses now there are a ton of these there's no way that i could go over all of them it would be an entire video series not just a video but a video series of all the perks and benefits that you get from being in the military there is a ton of them so i'm just going to talk about the main ones the first one is going to be the basic allowance for subsistence also known as bas so if you live in a barracks or a base all of your meals are going to be provided for you and paid for you're not going to have to worry about that if not you will be entitled to bas bas is basically just meant to cover the cost of food for service members enlisted get about three hundred and seventy dollars a month whereas officers get around 250 the second one i'm going to talk about is bah or basic allowance for housing now no matter what in the military you're always going to have a place to stay if you live on the base you'll of course be living inside of the base that's pretty obvious if you live off the base you'll be given what's known as bah in order to cover your costs now the amount you're going to receive for bh is going to vary quite a bit it depends on where you live your cost of living if you have a wife children all kinds of different things like that you can figure out how much you would receive using the bh calculator which i will link down in the description below it will generally be more than enough for you to pay your rent and utilities in whatever area that you live another one is going to be known as hardship duty pay or hdp this is basically the extra pay that you'll earn if and when you get sent to zones outside of the united states which are considered to be dangerous so from my research this is given in 50 dollar increments and generally speaking it's going to be between 50 and 150 a month now another one that's similar to this is going to be known as hostile fire pay or imminent danger pay hfp slash idp this one is given to those who are currently serving in live combat zones this one's going to be around 225 a month now i already touched on this one but if you're a medical doctor for instance who would normally be able to make 300 000 a year as a civilian they're going to make sure that you get a lot higher than what you would normally get paid for your officer rank so the military has what's known as specialty pays in order to incentivize doctors to join now that of course is an extreme example but there's a lot of other examples that are not quite as extreme but there's still quite a bit of money another example of this would be flight pay where they pay up to 840 a month to pilots in order to incentivize them to stay in the military there's a ton of other examples of course i'll leave the link down in the description so you can check all of them out there's going to be flying duty parachute duty pay demolition duty pay thermal stress duty pay and many many more special operations is known to qualify for a lot of these types of specialty duty pay and so if you're someone who is a career military person a lot of the time they're going to go for a lot of these specialty duty pays in order to make more money there are also a ton of perks when you retire from the military and i won't mention all of them but you're going to get access to more jobs health insurance cheap flights better home loans discounts many many other examples now in part four we're going to talk about the new retirement pay which recently got changed traditionally the military had a pension plan but recently they changed it to what's known as the blended retirement system so this is basically composed of what's known as a thrift savings plan which is very similar to the 401k if you guys familiar with some of my other videos and then the second thing is getting a check for life if you've served in the military for 20 years or more now the thrift savings plan like i said is very similar to the 401k they will match five percent of your entire paycheck every single month so let's say you make a thousand dollars a month they match five percent which is fifty dollars you put in fifty dollars a month they match fifty dollars total is going to be a hundred dollars a month going into your investment account now it differs from the 401k in that you can choose to invest that into a Roth IRA or a traditional IRA which has some benefits now i've made videos about the difference between the 401k and the Roth IRA but basically this thrift savings plan has a lot of the positives of both the 401k as well as the Roth IRA so i think it's actually better than either one on its own this is essentially so everyone should opt into this no matter what now the second part is the check for life this one is pretty simple after 20 years you're going to receive a check for life when you retire it's calculated by multiplying two percent of your base pay by every year that you've served so if you've served for 20 years you're making a hundred thousand dollars a year when you retire you're going to get paid forty thousand dollars a year for the rest of your life if you decide to serve an extra five years so you did 25 you'd be making 50 thousand dollars a year for the rest of your life now in part five i'm going to give an example of an enlisted person and kind of what they could do let's say that you joined as an enlisted man and you had a plan you wanted to learn the skills of a nuclear operator like my friend did you do your research and you discover that the navy is willing to train you and it's a very common career path progression once you get out of the navy you contact somebody who has actually done this themselves and they give you the okay they recommend going into the navy they tell you exactly what you should do in order to get into the position that they are now so you serve in the navy for a few years as an enlisted man and you learn the trade you don't get paid all that much of course but you do get fed you get free housing and you get to travel the world on top of this you are going to learn a lot of valuable lessons from serving in the military that might not directly translate to you making more money but they'll probably indirectly translate things like work ethic discipline how to live a structured life are all going to be very valuable in the future then you retire from the military you go straight into a job where you're making six figures a year just like my friend did you won't be getting the paycheck every single month for the rest of your life however you are going to be set for life so the next one we're going to talk about the officer example so let's say you decide you want to become a military man and you do want to do it as a career so you become an officer you work for 20 years just like I mentioned before and you earn about 2.8 million dollars for that 20 years of work that doesn't count your basic housing allowance which if you're really smart about it you could actually use that to pay off a mortgage that also doesn't count a lot of the specialty pay which many people end up getting if you average an extra 500 dollars a month of specialty pay over a 20 year period that's going to be an extra 120 thousand dollars now the thrift savings plan would of course fluctuate with the stock market depending on how much you make but using a Roth IRA calculator since that one is the most similar to the thrift savings plan in my opinion you'd have at least 230 thousand dollars invested in your retirement account at 38 years old when you would retire and realistically it would probably be quite a bit more than that that was a pretty conservative estimate now if you wanted to at this point you could ride off into the sunset and retire at the age of 38 but most likely you wouldn't do that 20 years of military service instilled a strong work ethic values and taught you how to be a leader these are all very valuable skills that will serve you for the rest of your life and you'll likely make really good money when you retire from the military many people who retire from the military go on to work in great careers sometimes they're over six figures a year and oftentimes they'll end up starting their own businesses as well hope you guys enjoyed the video if you did hit the like button just a gentle tap on it is all you need to do subscribe ring the notification bell comment down below any thoughts comments criticisms etc i especially appreciate any input or feedback from people who have been in the military and they want to give tips to other people that's especially appreciated i always love starting conversations in the comment section and before you go make sure to check out my other videos right here i made them just for you