<prompt> Human: Ive been in the Coast Guard for 3.5 years now.Im an E-4, married.With BAH, I take home 3200 a month. Thats after 200 goes into my TSP, which is set to Roth right now.From there, rent is 1200, I have a kinda pricey phone bill 170ish for two lines.I pay 95 a month for my truck payment; which is fine for me. Its more of a driving tax then anything else. Im a mechanic, so Im perfectly fine driving a thirty year old truck. :P I have 2,254.21 left on my auto loan. My wifes car is paid off. Insurance for both vehicles comes out to 1632 a year.Utilities come up to about 130 a month.My wife brings home about 1500 a month working retail, she should be getting a pretty large raise soon; so that should go up to 1800ish.Thats all the numbers out of the way. Im really just looking for advice from other people who have been in a similar situation as we are. Were not poor, but we have spent the last two years constantly on the verge of being broke. Weve only just recently started saving money, with a goal of putting away 500 a month. Savings account is at 700! whooohhh!Were both pretty horrible with money, so that can be a problem. But we ARE getting better. I dont really know what sort of advice Im looking for. I plan on doing a full twenty years in the CG, which would net me a pension of anywhere from 3000 a month or up, depending on what I do while Im in. Id like to get some college knocked out by my eight year mark, and cross over to the officer side of the house. Thats where the real money is. If I could get that done, Id pretty much be set for life.So...anything I could soshould do better? I read a lot of things here, and I know nothing about a lot of it, to be honest. It seems that a lot of the conversation doesntcant apply to military members, and that most people here are sitting waaay higher up than I am on the totem pole of money.tl;dr, military, making decent money, happy with my life, but Id like to know how to do it smarter.Edit: oh, wow. I didnt expect to get so many responses; all with such good info. Thank you all so much! Im going to read through all of this and get back to you!  <response>: First off, you need to figure out the real numbers, because based off what you wrote, you should have almost 3000 left over. You neglected food, incidentals like gas and haircuts etc. You need to create an actual budget after you sit down and track your actual spending. 