It
is well known -- or at least many say that -- that the military does
not pay its members well. I certainly heard that often throughout my
career; that I could do much better "on the outside." Someday I may talk
about that; whether that was true or not. [I felt early on that money /
income / financial status was not the only way one measured success / a
life well lived.]
Whatever.
I don't have my pay stubs in front of me but I think my initial annual salary was in the range of $25,000. I don't know. I don't remember. I could be way off.
Later: from the internet,
the 1980 military pay chart, a captain (an O-3 with at least four years
of service): $1,614.90 / month, or $19,378.80. In addition to that, I
would have earned various "special pays." I was not yet a flight surgeon
so I did not earn flight pay. So, $25,000 per annum is a pretty good
wag.
Whatever.
But, I invested "to the max" when I was on active duty. Our two daughters graduated from very expensive colleges; and both were debt-free before I retired.
We never lived "very well" when it came to material things; we generally lived in substandard housing, particularly when we lived overseas. We moved a dozen times and always lost money in a move even though the military "paid for the move." It always took two years to recover financially from a move.
As noted, I invested "to the max" while on active duty. I started a brokerage account for each of our two daughters. When they got married, I quit following those accounts and to this day have no idea what their accounts are worth.
I am visiting one of the two daughters in Portland, OR, this week. I knew I had invested in a tech / chip company early in my investing days. It was the only chip company in which I invested and it was in the younger daughter's account. That chip company has done very, very well recently, so I was curious. I asked my daughter how much that investment had grown; what it was worth today.
She told me: it has just hit the six-figure
threshold. I can't imagine what my initial investment in this particular
chip company was but it couldn't have been more than $5,000 and even
that seems like a stretch. I'll bet it was a couple of thousand dollars.
It never paid a dividend, if I recall correctly.
It's not AAPL and it's not NVDA but it is a well-known chip company today. At the time I bought it, I don't think "anyone" had really heard of it. I made a one-time investment -- again, that's why I doubt it was as much as $5,000 -- and then "forgot about it." I tracked it periodically but then lost track of it until tonight.
Pure luck. I came across the company while reading some "science" magazine ... I think it was Scientific American. The company was a start-up at the time. Long story. Associated with Sprint, my cellphone carrier. [Later:
the Sprint name as a stand-alone company came into being in 1987, which
is about the time I was just getting into investing. I recall my first
equity investment was in 1984.]
The point is that even on a military salary .... fill in the blank.
For the archives.
Oh, my only source of income. My bad. I wrote that my only source of income was my military salary. I forgot that my wife worked for a couple of years when we were stationed in Bitburg Air Base, Germany. Her entire salary was put into her IRA and other investments after her IRA was maxed out. She started taking RMDs several years ago -- enough to cover at least one Norwegian cruise for both of us each year, had we so desire -- and yet her IRA is almost as much as when she first started taking RMDs. [Later: as of June 18, 2024, her IRA now exceeds -- despite taking distributions for the past ten years at about 5% per year -- what her IRA maxed out when we quit contributing.]
