I realized after sharing why we live on post at Fort Gordon that I never posted about our decision to live off-post at Fort Carson.
Back in the fall of 2014, Mac received orders, and we knew we were officially moving to Fort Carson. The housing allowance in the Colorado Springs area is pretty generous, so we decided to look at housing options both on and off-post at Fort Carson. Our grand plan was to find a place to live, have me move all of our household goods out there, then have Mac and I road trip with Purrburger to our new and somewhat settled home.
Since Mac was still deployed, I decided to make a house-hunting trip out to Colorado. I found a Realtor through Zillow and arranged to see a bunch of houses. That house-hunting trip led to us buying our house. If you’re familiar with the area, we lived in Springs Ranch on the east side of Powers. Our decision to live off-post at Fort Carson came down to three reasons.
Location, location, location.
Fort Carson sits on the south end of the Colorado Springs metro area. I didn’t have a job but was applying for jobs across town and in the Denver area. Having already lived in Colorado, I didn’t want to commute 50+ miles each way if I found a job in Denver.
Timing
We’ve honestly looked at living on-post at every duty station we’ve been to. It can make a lot of sense from a cost and commute perspective, so we’ve never eliminated it right away. I stopped by the Fort Carson housing office during my trip in October. We knew that Mac would be home at the end of December for us to move to Colorado at the beginning of January. The housing office told me to expect at least a 3-6 month stint on the housing waiting list.
During my house-hunting trip, we looked at seven of the ten houses we wanted to look at. Three were already off the market. The Colorado Springs housing market is hot. We found a house online not too long before my trip that I fell in love with. It had the most PERFECT view of Pikes Peak, and I secretly wanted that house to be ours. The price dropped a few thousand dollars between when we found it and when I looked at it, so I knew we needed to make an offer. We wound up closing in exactly 60 days and had our household goods delivered two days later. The timing worked out perfectly, and I was able to unpack and set up our house before we officially moved to Colorado.
Budget
As I said, the housing allowance in Colorado Springs is pretty generous. We were able to buy a house with a mortgage that was less than half of Mac’s BAH. Even if you threw in utilities, we were still several hundred dollars under BAH every single month. Obviously, you don’t come across deals like this all too often in military life. We decided that it made good financial sense for us to buy a house in this situation.
Have you lived in Colorado Springs? Did you live on or off-post at Fort Carson?
