Managing COVID-19's Financial Impact on Veteran and Military Caregiving

As family caregivers, we have a tendency to forget about ourselves and our financial resources while caring for others. Managing the financial challenges of caregiving is an aspect of self-care that is all too often invisible or ignored, but dealing with it is vital. I can attest that caring for loved ones can be financially devastating, as I cared for Mom and Dad (who was a veteran) for more than a decade. Family caregivers, on average, spend approximately $7,400 a year of their personal income on the out-of-pocket costs of caregiving. Additionally, military and veteran family caregivers face more frequent financial hurdles, which have been further magnified by the financial fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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A sneak peek at the 2020 Blue Star Families’ annual Military Family Lifestyle Survey, fielded from Sept. 8 to Oct. 16, 2020 (it will be fully released later this month), reveals the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the lives of active-duty service members or their spouses/domestic partners. Survey respondents report significant changes in the financial and caregiving aspects of their lives during the pandemic, including:

• 45 percent report their caregiving situation is worse or much worse
• 10 percent could not provide care at all
• 32 percent report their financial situation is worse or much worse
• 60 percent experience stress due to their financial situation

For caregivers of active-duty military, it may be particularly difficult to help loved ones during military deployment and repeated station changes. We know that long-distance caregivers tend to spend more money than those caring for someone nearby (as do those caring for someone living with dementia). Sixty percent of military and veteran caregivers do not live with the loved one they care for, according to Caregiving in the U.S. 2020.

Military and veteran caregivers also tend to take on their roles for longer periods of time, sometimes due to service-related injuries to young soldiers that follow them for the rest of their lives. Nearly 7 in 10 (68 percent) military and veteran caregivers care for someone with a long-term condition, and 67 percent help with medical/nursing tasks. The intensity and the expenses add up over time. Forty-four percent of military and veteran caregivers experience at least one financial impact.

Jessica Allen, an accredited financial counselor, not only has many years of experience helping others deal with their finances, she's also a military spouse and caregiver for her husband, who was injured by an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan in 2011. He is now medically retired from the Army. She says that when he was injured, she didn't get much support in figuring out how to deal with the impact of his care. But assistance for military families has improved over the years as she and others have advocated for more support and services.

"People think that my husband is 100 percent taken care of by the VA, but there are actually many out-of-pocket costs,” says Allen.