What To Do With Your Military Enlistment Bonus

what's going on guys so you join the army and you got a bonus what the heck should you do with it so in this video guys I want to let you guys know something that has helped me a lot in changing my mindset of things and I see a lot of my fellow soldiers and young guys fall into the trap of this whole money and bonuses issue and it just you know you could really set yourself up for a lot success if you use your bonus the right way for those of you guys who do not have a bonus or you have not joined the military yet and you're wondering how you can get a bonus a couple of ways that a couple things that affect your ability to get a bonus number one is just going to be your enlistment time so usually like two shorter contracts like below four years are not typically going to get a enlistment bonus to guy contract longer than that you might get one and then the job that you're picking has to do with in I've heard and I've been told and I've read that your ASVAB score also has to deal has to do with your potential to get a bonus or getting a higher bonus basically the bonuses that they offer you are basically just an incentive for you to want to join that specific branch or that specific job now as a little caveat to that don't don't don't join a job just because of the bonus because you know you'd be much happier with a little bit less money do you want a job you want then a little bit of money you know doing a job that you like like happiness Trump's money like all the time now that being said what should you do with that bonus if you do get a bonus one of the things I really really want to stress you guys is don't blow it right usually in or in the army I'm not exactly sure how it works and other branches of the military because I know it kind of varies but in the Army and the Army Reserves what happens is after AIT after you finish advanced individual training you will get your enlistment bonus and you'll get 50% of it that year and then you will get 25% of your bonus after two years of your contract and you'll get the last 25% is two years after that so it's again so it's going to take you four years to get your entire bonus now so we can use this as an example which is my example whenever I joined the army two years ago I signed up for a fifteen thousand dollar contract now this is taxed so I'm going to go ahead and give you guys like the numbers because I totally remember because I was kind of blown away at how much they taxed everything so fifteen thousand dollars was my enlistment bonus about three months after I graduated AIT I actually got the first half of my bonus which was about a little bit over six thousand dollars right so with a fifteen thousand dollar bonus half of it being 7,500 and after taxes I got about six thousand sixty-one hundred dollars so they took out nearly a thousand five hundred dollars in taxes of that money and I was just like what the heck why isn't it tax-free I understand there's a little side note I know people when you're deployed if you wait and you get your bonuses when you're deployed its tax-free so that's a little tip for all you guys who are going to go active duty try to wait until you're deployed maybe to get your bonus if that's possible a lot of people reenlist whenever they're overseas again so there's that's tax free because $15,500 being taxed office was a $7,500 bonus it's kind of ripoff if you ask me but so that's what I got for my fifty percent so that's fifteen thousand so let's say I don't know that's what like a twenty percent fifteen to twenty percent tax rate on that I guess plus there's a quick little calculation it's about eighteen point six six percent tax rate for the numbers I just gave you guys so you can just use that to calculate how much you're going to get selected you get $20,000 bonus $10,000 bonus five thousand dollar bonus just go ahead and tax that 15 to 20 percent depending on which tax bracket you're going to fall into so yeah now before I joined I knew that I was going to get this fifteen thousand dollar bonus and I thought it was going to be about seventy five hundred dollars and I'm going to ask myself right what the heck am I going to spend this money on I know nobody really told me or advised me on to anything and and what I did was before I joined I looked at my options on what I can use that money on in order to make more money and so I'm talking about here guys is investing I'm not talking about you know any specific thing in general what I did personally was real estate investing and I started with mobile homes because they're cheaper and you can buy a mobile home for less than seventy five hundred dollars and get rent from that but what I want you guys to understand is you should look for investment opportunities in order to turn that money into something bigger now I wouldn't spend all the money because you don't feel the reward of that so something I've been told is to basically spend about ten percent of the money that you earn if you get a large amount or large sum of money and a lump sum so let's say it was tax-free and I got seventy five hundred dollars just lump sum put into my bank account because it was direct deposited basically with that rule applying spend ten percent of it on whatever the heck you want about seven hundred fifty dollars I could kind of just blow on something and I was still okay about it right and then the leftover money into six thousand seven hundred and twenty five or whatever two hundred fifty I could invest that and use that money to grow the large sum into a bigger amount right so the different avenues that you could use to invest stock market investing personally right now I wouldn't advise it because if that's your first thing you're investing in you're going to use it you're going to use up a lot of time trying to just learn that I've spent a little bit of time dabbling in it but really it just takes a whole lot more time in energy than you think if you actually want to make money investing in the stock market so that's one thing another big thing that I've used myself to make quite a few hundred dollars I've made about five or six hundred dollars on this just kind of doing it on the side it's flipping small things on the like Facebook marketplace or whatever and if you have a larger sum of money you could basically increase your margins and flip things and have a little bit more flexibility in what you choose to buy and sell so what I'll talk what I'm talking about guys is like what I've done you just in your downtime like after basic training or after AIT and stuff you can get your bonus you have the money and the cash to actually go out and invest something you can use to make a couple extra 100 bucks or even thousands of dollars if you spend more time than I did because I only spent minutes doing this right all night to Facebook marketplace and Craigslist and stuff like that you can just search you know items that are selling and if something is in the area of knowledge that you know and you're like dang that's a really good price and I could sell that at like a forty percent up for forty percent markup price or whatever and make some money on it then you should buy that and immediately turn around and sell it and I've made around like six hundred dollars this year 2017 doing that and I've only spent like essentially maybe two hours in total searching for the stuff and then I listed online and I just say come and pick it up and people will come to my house and I'll just sell this stuff right so that's one way you can make money the way I made money personally was some real estate investing and I knew that that is a larger it takes a large a lot more money to start with real estate investing and so what I did was is I started with like the smallest amount of real estate you could possibly do which are single wide mobile homes the first home I bought believe it or not I bought it for $300 I bought a home for $300 it was a piece of crap I work to have a deal with a mobile home park owner I had him pay for that home to me moved right so I didn't have to pay the $3,000 to move it so I worked out a deal with him and then I ended up using my money it's a little bit the money that I saved that AIT and base is training to fix up this mobile home and sell it right one of the things I learned from this is it was my first time doing it so I spent a little bit more money than I should have so I basically just came out even on this project that took me a few months right it shouldn't take me that long but because this is my first you know endeavor into real estate and you know fixing things up and so like that it took me longer than it should have and it cost a little bit more than it should have and you guys should know that when you get into investing you're not going to be an expert right after that now after I had saw that money actually before I had sold that money I bought a home for $3,000 I bought a mobile home for $3,000 the next day I sold it for $4,000 right I didn't do anything to assault for $4,000 then the next week or something like that or it might have been like that week I bought another mobile home for $4,000 so I basically bought that one for 3,000 because I had bought the one for 3,000 sold it from 4,000 the next day and then that week I bought another one for $4,000 and then going out and looking at and everything there was only a couple hundred dollars I needed to put into it before I could get a renter in that and that's what I did put about 400 dollars into that home and and now it's currently being rented out and it's been renting out for the past year or so and it's doing great money that I've used from that has turned into another mobile home that I have bought recently and now that's more income that I'm getting because I decided to use my money wisely over the long haul that $6,000 investment that I had used with some monies I had saved up from a ITM basis training is going to turn into a whole lot more money in the next three years then if I were to just spend that on something right now there's other different avenues that you could go into into investing money you could you know sell things on Amazon you could do I don't know whatever the heck it is I do not want this video to be do stock market stock market investing don't or do real estate investing or do you know whatever else I want you guys to know that with the money that you have there is something that you're passionate about there's something that you have connections with there's something out there that you could do that is more beneficial than buying a car right it's more beneficial than just blowing your money in want to come to shoes because I have a ton of shoes and I had to limit myself to like one pair of shoes whenever I got that money because you know previous mean II would have bought like 10 pairs of shoes with that $6,000 but a little bit older immature me wants to prepare myself for the future and I've decided to invest that money and I want you guys to do that I want you guys to you know sit down think about things and do some Google search and spend a little bit of time researching something that you would actually have kind of fun with investing in something that you would you know spend some time doing you know to help better yourself and better your financial future rather than blowing your money because guys people do it all the time people will graduate from basic training they'll graduate from AIT and just blow like freakin two three thousand dollars on some stupid stuff like you know really nice you know iPad super nice laptops that they don't even need because they're not even tech guys or whatever but people will just blow money they will buy extremely overpriced cards because if you're next to a military base you guys have probably heard this the annual percentage rates on those cars are ridiculous so don't ever buy a car near a military base and but regardless people will still buy cars that they can't afford you know the buy the new you know no freaking whatever nice car there is at the time whenever y'all buy your cars you'll see it people will be buying it and you will be hopefully shaking your head like dude why are you doing this you could be using money so much better so that's pretty much it for this video guys I hope you enjoyed it I hope you actually learned something or actually didn't actually learn something but got your brain thinking about what to do with your bonus because for you guys that got a bonus you're lucky enough to have that and there's really not at least for me there's really not that many times in your life that you're going to be just handed over a couple thousand dollars you know whatever your bonus was whether it's like $8,000 or $10,000 and if you're lucky enough to get the $40,000 bonus it's not very common right it's kind of like limit winning a game show to me right I felt kind of like I have gone and signed up for something that kind of won me a game show winning so if I had you know went to first thing popped in my head will fortune write if I had won $6,000 and world fortune that would have been freaking awesome right and you don't want to just blow the that money think of think of it as an investment into your future you know spend that 10% on whatever the heck you want spend that 10% on those shoes and stuff like that I mean I spent around that seven thunders I really tried to stick strict with that because I knew that with real estate investing and what I was doing I was going to get about on average about a 50% return on my investment every single year and that is worth way more money than whatever the heck I would have bought in the short term that would depreciate in value so that's it I hope you guys enjoyed if you did like comment subscribe and I will see you guys later [Music]

Channel: Matt Ward

Views: 126,686

Rating: 4.9455333 out of 5

Keywords: Shootemup89, Army, Army Reserves, So you decided to join the army, What is the army like, What is basic like, What is basic Training like, What is AIT like, What is red phase like, What is white phase like, Blue phase, Red phase, White phase, Army Training, How To, Army Basic Training, Army BCT, Army BCT Red Phase, Army Failures, Failing Basic Training, Basic, Training, USAR, National Guard BCT, USA

Id: ABWtsBxez1A

Length: 14min 6sec (846 seconds)

Published: Fri May 26 2017