• Sydney’s children on the couch watching television

Maintaining a Minimalistic Home for the Sake of PCS Season

Written By Sydney Smith

If there is one thing that stresses me out as a military spouse, it is clutter in my house.

If you’ve been married to someone in the military for more than a few years, you know the lingering doom of the inevitable. Another move. Another total uprooting and relocating of your family and belongings to a foreign place. If you’re like me, moving is an extremely stressful life event, which doesn’t really get any easier with practice, unfortunately. If I can offer one tip to simplify your life, especially around PCS season, it would be to start by simplifying your home.

In this piece, I will talk about the ways I like to always maintain a minimalistic home to make my house “moving ready” at any given moment. What is a minimalistic home exactly? I think this means something different to everyone. For me, a minimalist home doesn’t quite mean a house without junk. It means a house without any useless junk.

I met a lady who created the rule that during a PCS, she gave away, threw away or donated any items she did not use in her current house. She said, “Why should I bring an item to my new house that I did not ever use in my last house?” This made a lot of sense to me, and I have adopted this rule into my own home. So where do you start, you ask? It just really depends.

If you are preparing to move soon, you might want to complete an expedited version of the following steps I give below. If you just recently moved, you should wait at least a few months to begin the process. If you moved several months ago, now would be the perfect time to start.

After living in many houses over the past seven years of military life, I have found that it takes about six months of living in your home before you know where everything belongs in it. You only know so much when you unpack each of those boxes those first few days living in your new house. You can try and be as strategic as possible with your placement, but I promise you there will be things you decide to change later. The first six months, you will be focused on getting acclimated to a new location, making friends, getting established with doctors, dentists, schools, extracurricular activities. Once you feel yourself getting into a good rhythm in your home, you can begin focusing on fine-tuning everything to meet your specific needs in that season so that it all makes the most practical sense for your family.

So here are the steps below:

1. To begin, sit down and make a list of every room and closet in your house. Include your garage and car on this list because, while not inside your home, these are places that you utilize often and need to organize just as much as your indoor spaces. Number your list in order of which spaces you will organize first through last. Plan to tackle one space at a time, not moving to the next space until the current one is complete.

Note: You will need to divide some spaces up into multiple zones. For instance, the kitchen is the most daunting. Divide the kitchen into three spaces: fridge/freezer, pantry, and kitchen cabinets/drawers. Similarly, separate closets from rooms. For instance, make the master bedroom one day and the master bedroom closet a different day.

2. Create a designated space for all unwanted items: Make two piles: the throwaway pile and the giveaway pile (you may also need a pile for items to sell). I like to use our garage for this space, and then I save organizing the garage for last. This works well for me, because moving things from the house to the garage makes me feel like the items are “gone,” and then the piles of unwanted things collecting in the garage ultimately motivate me to tackle it once it gets to the point of overwhelming.

3. For each space, this will be the process you will go through:

a. Empty the space completely. Take every single item out of every drawer, shelf and cabinet. Use an all-purpose cleaner to wipe everything down.

b. Physically pick up each item that you removed and ask yourself if it makes sense to keep that item. If you haven’t used it in the last six months, the answer is most likely “No.”

c. Put unwanted items in a box and take it to the garage and sort them into throwaway or giveaway piles.

d. For whichever items are remaining that you do want to keep… ask yourself, where does it make the most sense to store this item? If you use it often, it should be in a highly accessible place. If you don’t use it regularly, it can be stored in the back of a cabinet or on top of a hard-to-reach shelf, and it will rarely inconvenience you. For this step, you are strategically finding a home for each item.

Once you’ve completed each of these steps in each space in your house, you should be feeling like your home is so much more manageable and purposeful, and you will thank yourself later for that when you’re packing up (and later unpacking) those boxes full of manageable items with purpose.

Blog Brigade unites military spouses by creating a community built on shared experiences and mutual support. Navigating the complexities of military life can be challenging, but you don’t have to do it alone. Military OneSource offers valuable resources focused on well-being, readiness, and connection. Explore a range of moving and housing resources tailored to your needs.

Kristi kissing her husband while her children sit on a plane’s steps

Retirement 101 for Military Spouses

Written By Kristi Stolzenberg

We know by now that a career in the military isn’t like other careers. A career in the military doesn’t just impact one member of the family from 9 to 5; it comes home. In fact, it dictates where we call home, how long we can live there, where we go next, and through years of military life experiences, it shapes the lives of each military family member.

Transition Course

So, of course, when military retirement comes around, it is a family affair. Anticipating this, I didn’t put up a fight when my husband encouraged me to attend a transition seminar just for spouses. The Marine Corps calls it the Spouse Transition and Readiness Seminar, or STARS (because we love an acronym). I can’t speak for all branches, but I can confirm that Marines attend a mandatory, multiday separation brief, and Marine spouses have the option to attend a CliffsNotes version for a few hours.

I went into the seminar not really knowing what to expect and came away with a page full of notes, reminders and contacts. If you have space in your schedule, it can’t hurt to attend; it’s a way to get answers to any looming unknowns and catch tips about TRICARE, VA benefits, budgeting and moving that might not even be on your radar. This course was a great reminder that every family and situation is different — even as we all reach the same finish line. You probably have questions (I sure do). Ask them! And, as I was reminded in the seminar, base resources are still accessible even after your spouse is no longer active duty.

Kristi and her family outside smiling

(Civilian) Life Skills

I have mere months left of matching green boot socks. While I’m all too happy to hang up this skill that won’t translate to civilian spouse life, I know a few other things are about to change, and I’m not just talking about having BAH pried out of our white-knuckle grips and experiencing copays at the doctor’s office for all you current TRICARE Primers (my fellow select folks know that drill).

With the change in career for our spouses comes a change in everyone’s schedule. Maybe their schedule will become more predictable; maybe it won’t. Maybe they’ll be home more, maybe less, but one thing is certain: it will be an adjustment for the household, and with any adjustment comes the need for patience.

On top of schedule changes, there will be budgetary changes. As we mourn the loss of BAH, we can welcome retirement pay, potential disability pay and a new income (potentially two if you will also be reentering the workforce now that moving is a thing of the past). There will no longer be retention bonuses or special-duty payments to count on, and — depending on which state you call home — you may be facing state taxes for the first time in a while and tax on retirement pay for the first time ever. Paying close attention to the budget as your family makes the transition is crucial. There are plenty of tools that can help.

As we bid adieu to our state of residence driver’s license for a license where we actually live (I will not miss having to navigate that layer of confusion), and help our kids figure out what it looks like to no longer be a military kid, I continue to remind myself that while this change touches us all, one of us will feel it more than the rest — my husband, the actual retiring service member. His day-to-day will change drastically. No more flight suit onesies (and boot socks) every day. Some of the changes will be exciting, but it’s mostly foreign, which can lead to increased stress and losing sleep over the what-ifs. And, as salty as some service members can be by retirement, deep down, they still love the mission, the camaraderie and the sense of purpose behind their service. It’s hard to match that in the civilian world. Anyone who has worked an office job knows that it’s rare to find an officemate that becomes family; that’s definitely a characteristic of the military community.

All of this is to say that there may be a few bumps on the exit ramp to retirement. There may be anxiety, stress, a fair share of unknowns and much less green laundry (yay), but as military life has taught us well, change can be exciting. Face this change as a family; support each other and smile for that new driver’s license photo.

Blog Brigade unites military spouses by creating a community built on shared experiences and mutual support. Navigating the complexities of military life can be challenging, but you don’t have to do it alone. Military OneSource offers valuable resources focused on well-being, readiness, and connection. Explore a range of retirement resources tailored to your needs.

Kristi and her family on a hike

Wise Beyond Their Years: An Unexpected Perk of Being a Military-Connected Kid

Written By Kristi Stolzenberg

Before I got married and had two cool kids, I was a middle school English teacher. I was assigning book reports and grading essays. I was low-key panicking trying to figure out how to teach my son the ABCs. My brain could not compute how to teach a child the first layer of reading and writing.

Then, one glorious day, with absolutely no prompting or help from me, during a commercial break from late-morning television, he suddenly broke into song: “A, B, C, D…” He nailed it — all 26 letters. While I was losing sleep over how I would help him learn the alphabet, he taught himself (with a little help from his tablet and shows — one point for screen time).

I dust off this 12-year-old story to illustrate that our kids don’t only learn from us. They learn from their surroundings, their peers and everything in their world. The advantage military-connected kids have is that their worlds are wide, diverse and often challenging. Now that our kids are in middle school (and I’m much more comfortable helping with English homework), an age when they’re growing and changing physically and mentally, I can’t help but feel that they’re at the forefront of the maturity race, along with the other MilKids at their school.

Much like the ABCs, I don’t think this maturity comes from me. It’s shaped by moving every few years — leaving friends behind and making new ones. It’s about experiencing different cultures, whether that’s across the globe or from state to state. It’s prioritizing time and experiences over material things. It’s about stepping up and being brave when their dad had to be away from home. It’s understanding how precious family and life are and how quickly both can change. Of course, it’s about spending impressionable years with adults who treated them like honorary nieces and nephews.

Kristi’s children in front of a door smiling

If you don’t have a middle schooler at home and it’s been a while since you walked those halls, I’ll quickly refresh your memory. This is the time when kids are learning who their real friends are — some new ones are coming into the fold, while, as devastating as it can be, others are drifting away. Most are terrified of looking stupid or being excluded; FOMO (fear of missing out) is raging as wildly as hormones; and everything their parents or siblings do is humiliating.

Parent and child holding hands

Military-connected kids, including ours, are not exempt from any of this, but nearly every stereotypical middle school behavior is countered by something that makes me a proud mom.

Recognizing the new kid and befriending them — that’s something military-connected kids do, and I’m proud to say our kids do it too. Respecting different beliefs and cultures, embracing differences and tuning into others’ feelings aren’t always top of mind at that age. To be fair, many adults haven’t figured it out either. Military-connected kids exposed to diverse cultures and perspectives can get good at reading people. It’s a skill they develop every time they enter a new environment where they don’t know anyone, which can make them highly attuned to others.

Krisit’s daughter smiling at school

Our country likes to talk a lot about the struggles military-connected kids face and sure, those struggles are real. But they overcome each one, and they’re stronger on the other side.

In the last several weeks, I’ve been approached by both of our kids at different times and in different ways, but the complaint was essentially the same: This person or group of people is so annoying because [insert reason]. In both cases, I asked to hear more about the situation. If you have a middle schooler, you know that I had to be very sly with this investigation. After hearing the facts, it was clear to me in both cases that the issue was a maturity gap. Whether it’s someone not pulling their weight in a group project or coming to class unprepared and asking to borrow supplies every day. Whether it’s finding out someone said something hurtful about them or not being able to understand why someone would say something hurtful to another student, we’ve faced it all this school year. Each time, the question is always why. Why would someone do that? Why would someone act like that? Children that have had to learn to be responsible, that know what it feels like to be new and not have a single friend in the room, those kids are naturally going to mature faster than someone who hasn’t been challenged in the same ways.

Kristi’s son and a monkey

Kristi’s daughter posing in front of food

I often say that I’m jealous of our kids. They’ve had so many incredible experiences I never had just because they were born military-connected kids. It doesn’t come without its challenges, but that just leads to a whole other reason to be jealous of them. At almost 12 and freshly 14, they’re mentally tough, compassionate, independent, and they aren’t afraid to do the right thing or step into a completely foreign place. To my MilKids and yours, never forget that your challenges are becoming your strengths.

Kristi’s children outside

Blog Brigade unites military spouses by creating a community built on shared experiences and mutual support. Navigating the complexities of military life can be challenging, but you don’t have to do it alone. Military OneSource offers valuable resources focused on well-being, readiness, and connection. Explore a range of parenting resources and tools tailored to your needs.

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