Move Season, Done Right — May 2026

Bottom line up front. May is peak PCS month and Military Appreciation Month at the same time. The work this month is mostly logistical: protect your move-day evidence, take the discounts that actually matter (and ignore the noise), and make sure survivor coverage is current before the long holiday weekend.

Move-day discipline — what to capture

Whether you're using HHG or running a PPM, the only insurance you have on move day is your own documentation. The five things to capture, in order:

1. A pre-move walkthrough video. Slow walk through every room, narrating condition. Cabinets open, drawers open, electronics powered on. Date and time the file metadata. This is your before-state evidence if a claim comes later.
2. High-value inventory. Anything over a few hundred dollars goes on a separate list with model numbers, serial numbers, and photos. The DPS claim system processes these faster when itemized up front.
3. Empty and full weight tickets at certified scales. PPM only. No tickets, no reimbursement — that's not a guideline, it's the rule. Two scales (origin and destination) with empty and full readings.
4. Inventory sheet review. When the carrier hands you the inventory at pickup, read it. Argue every "PBO" (packed by owner), "scratched", or "marred" line you disagree with — those notes follow your goods to the new station and limit your claim.
5. Delivery receipts. At the new station, note any damage on the delivery paperwork before signing. If a box is missing, write "missing" on the form. Verbal claims to the driver mean nothing.

If something does go sideways at delivery, you have 180 days from delivery to file a notice of loss/damage in DPS, and nine months total to file the full claim. Don't sit on it.

Memorial Day — confirm survivor coverage is current

Memorial Day weekend is the cleanest annual reminder to verify two pieces of paperwork:

• SGLI election and beneficiaries. The Servicemembers' Group Life Insurance (SGLI) maximum is $500,000. Coverage is automatic at the max unless you've opted down. Beneficiary designations are made in milConnect — confirm yours reflect your current life situation. Marriage, divorce, and births do not auto-update the form.
• SBP and DIC awareness. The Survivor Benefit Plan (SBP) is the retirement-side program; Dependency and Indemnity Compensation (DIC) is the active-duty/death-in-line-of-duty program through the VA. They are different and both matter — most service members never look at them until it's too late. The VA's DIC overview is the best plain-English starting point.

If you have specific questions about how SGLI, SBP, and DIC interact for your situation — especially if you have a former spouse or stepchildren in the picture — that's exactly the kind of thing Ask the Military Expert is built for.

Military Appreciation Month — what's worth taking

Every May, hundreds of brands run "thank a vet" promotions. Most are noise. The ones with durable financial value share three traits: written documentation, year-round availability if you ask, and verifiability against a recognized military discount network (ID.me, GovX, SheerID).

• Hotels and rental cars. Often the deepest year-round military discount in the U.S. economy — sometimes 10–25% off the best available rate. Always ask, always show ID. May promotions are typically just stacked, not unique.
• Home Depot, Lowe's, and major retail. 10% off, year-round, with verified ID. May discounts above that are usually time-bound and capped, but worth a check before any planned project spend.
• National Parks Annual Pass. Free for active-duty service members, dependents, and Gold Star families. May is when most families start planning summer trips — get the pass before the road trip.
• Free meals on Memorial Day. Almost always require an in-person visit and a current ID. Worth noting, not worth planning around.

Things to skip: "credit-card cash-back boosted for military this month" offers (the math rarely beats a 2% back card you already use), and "investment platforms with reduced fees this month" — fees are usually still higher than passively managed alternatives like the TSP. Run any investment-fee promotion through the TSP Modeler first to see how the comparison plays out over a 20-year horizon.

BAH "individual rate protection" — the rule you need to know

If your duty station's BAH rate dropped on January 1, you may not have noticed because individual-rate protection kept you on the higher prior rate. The protection holds as long as:

• You stay at the same duty station,
• Your dependency status doesn't change in a way that drops you to a lower rate, and
• Your pay grade doesn't decrease.

If any of those change — including a PCS later this summer — you snap to the current rate, which may be lower at the new station. Plan your housing budget against the new rate at the next station, not the protected rate at this one. Pull current rates from DTMO or via the Base Navigator's rent-vs-BAH overlay for each candidate ZIP.

New on Garrison Ledger

• The Briefing archive at /briefing is now publishing monthly with full citations.
• Ask the Military Expert now ships with a "definitive" confidence label when an answer is grounded in a JTR clause or DFAS rule, plus exact-language next steps you can paste into a finance-office email.
• The Base Navigator's composite score now dynamically reweights when individual data signals are unavailable, with a coverage percentage on every base — so a missing data source no longer skews the rank.

Sources verified May 2026

• HHG/PPM and DPS claim windows — move.mil
• JTR move regulations — DTMO JTR
• SGLI maximum and beneficiary management — VA SGLI
• SBP and DIC — VA Dependency & Indemnity Compensation
• BAH and individual-rate protection — DTMO BAH
• Military taxpayer resources — IRS.gov/military