YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK

The current tenant living in what will soon be our apartment is in the process of renovating their new home. The project is behind schedule, as remodeling projects can be. This affects us because it now seems that they do not plan to move out until September 1 – a month later than we had hoped, and two months later than the date in the original ad we answered more than a month ago. While the idea of living in the hotel for another 6-7 weeks is disappointing – there is a bigger storm brewing in the form of whether the military will finance another month in the hotel for us. To fully understand this predicament, I should probably fill you in on how this hotel reimbursement works:

The military’s first choice is to house us in one of the on-base hotels. Obviously, this is the most cost effective place for them to keep us. When the on-base hotels fill up, we are given permission to stay in town. This comes in the form of a “Certificate of Non-Availability Number” or “CNA”, which is valid for a specific period of time.

The military reimburses our hotel bill and give us an additional stipend for meals without questions for the first 60 days that we are in country. Basically, every 10 days, we ask the front desk for a bill containing our room charges (minus 19% VAT). We then take it to the housing office, where someone verifies that we are qualified to ask for reimbursement based on the currency of our CNA # and their knowledge of whether or not we have found a place to live. They literally rubber stamp the bill and then Hubbz can take it to the Finance office (on another base, of course!) to submit it for reimbursement. The meal stipend is a per diem that appears as a supplement to his pay each payday.

With a move in date of Sept 1, we will be solidly in the 60-90 day window of supplemented living in Germany. This means …well we don’t know exactly what it means, but it’s at the top of our list to ask around about it come Monday AM. We believe it can go a few ways:

1. They will look at our request, see that we have a signed lease for Sept 1 and decide that we’re not trying to milk the system. I think one big motivator is that they don’t want to finance a family that’s just too picky and is passing up perfectly good residences and thereby milking the government for more than their share.
2. They can look at our request and signed lease and say that Hubbz needs special permission from his command to extend the temporary living assistance we’re getting (Who wants the big boss to have to get involved in their rental issues?!?)
3. They can tell us that our temporary living money will dry up and we’ll have to find another place to live. We’ve scoped out and found a temporary furnished apartment company nearby. This would be reimbursed in a different way (they’d basically pay our “rent” like they will when we move into our apartment) and we’d lose our per diem, but it wouldn’t be too bad of a way to spend a month (we’d get a kitchen and a couch out of the deal!!).

We will find out how this is going to work in the coming days. Until then, we've extended our hotel reservation, and requested another CNA# that will cover us until Sept. We’ll keep plugging along and hopefully filling our weekends with adventures instead of house hunting!!