The extra $250 a month never covered much. Not the higher utility bills when one parent was home alone managing everything. Not the emergency child care when deployment orders came through. Not the gas money for those late-night drives to care for a sick child when your spouse is 7,000 miles away.The monthly payment, called Family Separation Allowance, hasn’t changed since 2002. Twenty-three years of inflation later, military families are about to receive their first raise. Advocates say it’s long overdue, but it’s smaller than Congress authorized.The fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, signed Oct. 18 by President Donald Trump, bumps the…

Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadHere comes Thanksgiving travel preparedness time. Thanksgiving is two days away, and you know what that means—awesome Thanksgiving leftovers, and the busiest travel day of the year is tomorrow, the day before Thanksgiving. 82 million people will be hitting the roads and skies this weekend, leading to packed airports, traffic jams, and inevitable delays. It’s a recipe for stress and frustration. As a preparedness-minded person, you already know the basics of travel safety. You’ve packed your bags, checked your routes and times, and added a few prepping extras—just in case. But holiday travel throws…

My grandmother once told me that she wished my grades had been a bit better because she secretly wanted me to go to Brown University. That was never in the cards–my grades would have had to be a whole lot better–but she admitted that it was because some ancestor of ours was a president of Brown and that I could go for free or something. I don’t know if that’s true, but in hindsight and based on the shooting there, I’m really glad my grades were merely acceptable. The whole security fiasco there makes it…