Author name: Brandon Lovingier, ChFC®, AFC®, MQFP®

Do you have questions about emergency savings? Here are my answers to the top 13 questions an enlisted service member might have about emergency funds. Keep in mind, this is just my opinion and your personal situation may be different. The biggest thing to me is that you actually have some type of emergency savings.

The time to think through a financial emergency is not during the emergency. When you’re in a stressful situation, if you don’t already have a game plan, you’re going to make mistakes – sometimes “financially fatal” mistakes. You really do want to know what to do in crisis, but that’s not always possible. Instead, I

There are many ways to use your military service to set yourself up for the future, the Marine Content Creator is an exceptional example. Please read along and hear the enlisted success story of the Marine Content Creator. I actually ran across him on Instagram and reached out to see if I could share his

Updated: October 14, 2025. Where should you turn for assistance in a government shutdown? I’ll spare you the lecture on having an emergency fund. If you don’t already have cash saved away, you won’t be able to do anything about it now. Let’s get your immediate needs handled first. I’d definitely keep an eye out

Having an emergency fund is vital to your long-term financial success. It’s really important to leave some amount of money completely separate just in case everything turns for the worse. You just never know what might happen and having cash on hand for an emergency is always a good idea. We’ve had an emergency fund

I was 24 years old and in charge of getting 52 souls safely to Afghanistan. There’s really no equivalent experience outside the military. I had no clue what I was doing, but I figured it out. That’s really the most succinct way of summing up what we do in the military – Figure It the

Life can be really stressful for enlisted service members. We can often get distracted with the mission, helping others, and just grinding it out. However, when we’re in the thick of things, we tend to overlook taking care of ourselves. Investing in your personal growth is critical. I’ll share my thoughts on how self-care can

Investing in yourself is one of the most overlooked, yet critically important areas to invest your time and money. As enlisted service members, we’re given a lot of opportunities to improve ourselves both inside and outside the military. There’s so much to cover here, so I’m splitting this topic into three parts: Education, Military Training

There’s so many different things we could focus on when it comes to investing, but time matters. It’s often overlooked too. In financial planning, we talk a lot about “time-horizon” and the time value of money (TVM) calculations we do. Bottom line: when you choose to invest your money in one place, you’re saying no