Posts Tagged ‘Transferred Benefits’

Scott, you were grandfathered in as far as your eligibility to use the Post 9/11 GI Bill yourself. You met the requirement of serving three years on active duty after September 10, 2001. So you have 36 months of eligibility that you can use.

The part where you were misled is the transfer of benefits part. The way Congress wrote the Post 9/11 GI Bill transfer rules, you have to be serving on or after August 1, 2009 in order to make a transfer request.

Right after the New GI Bill started, there was confusion in the services about the transfer of benefits rules, along with confusion on many other aspects of the New GI Bill. Consequently, thousands of veterans like you were denied the opportunity to make a transfer request, although you meet the all the requirements.

There were several parts of the Post 9/11 GI Bill that needed “fixin” and all but this glaring error, has been pretty much corrected. In my blog, I have tried before to get a ground roots movement going to pound on Congress to fix this last major mistake, but with no one wanting to take charge, it has not went anywhere.

There have been at least two bills in the past that were introduced in Congress that would have corrected this wrong, but not only did they not pass, they never even made it to a vote.

If we can get a petition going and get enough signatures, I think we could have an effect on this. If someone wants to take on this challenge, let me know.

With 14 months of Post 9/11 GI Bill eligibility Kim, he will be about one month short of it paying for his whole course, but I’m sure you realized that fact.  However, for the 14 months he has, the VA will pay for his tuition (at the resident rate which you indicated you will have after you move) directly to his school, plus he’ll get $83 per month in a book stipend. Because you are still serving, and he is using transferred benefits, he will not get any housing allowance (because you are drawing BAH for him already). If he had his own Post 9/11 GI Bill benefits from his own service, then he would get the housing allowance.

If he has not yet requested his Certificate of Eligibility, then he will need to do that before enrolling in school. He can do that by going to the eBenefits website and submitting VA Form 22-1990e. He will need his certificate when he enrolls in school and a Post 9/11 GI Bill student using transferred benefits.

The reason he could not transfer his GI Bill to you before he got out in 2007 is because the Post 9/11 GI Bill did not come into existence until August 1, 2009, however, for eligibility purposes, the date started on September 10, 2001.

So he couldn’t give you something that had not been developed yet at the time he retired. This is a catch 22 that thousands of veterans were caught in. They were retirement eligible and served the required six years of service, of which three years were after September 10, 2001, but because they got out before August 1, 2009, then never had a chance to make a transfer request to their dependents.

There have been a couple of legislative bills in Congress that if passed would have allowed these veterans the opportunity to make a transfer request after they retired, but the support was not there. Not only did these bills not pass, they never even made it to a vote.

If your husband has the Montgomery GI Bill, he can’t transfer it you to you either as it never had a transfer to dependents transfer option.

My recommendation is to contact your legislators and ask them to either draft legislation or support existing legislation to correct this wrong.

Actually Sergeant First Class, you haven’t missed out on anything, nor do you need to “sign up” for the GI Bill – you already have it just from your 14 years of service. And the good news is you can transfer as much or little of it to you kids as you want.

To qualify for the Post 9/11 GI Bill transfer benefit, you have to have served for at least six years and agree to serve an additional four years. You already have 14 years in, and I imagine you plan to stay until 20, so an additional four years should not be a problem for you.

Once you agree to another four years, you can go to the TEB website and enter into each kid’s record how many months you would like to give each one. You have 36 months to divide up among them.

Once your transfer requests are approved, then each kid receiving benefits must go to the eBenefits website and submit VA Form 22-1990e. In return, each will get a Certificate of Eligibility that they will need when registering for school as a GI Bill student. The important thing is to make the transfer now while you are still in because once you are out, it is too late to make a transfer.

The way the GI Bill works is you can only use one GI Bill at a time and if you had the Montgomery GI Bill and switched to the Post 9/11 GI bill, then you lose your rights to the Montgomery. Chapter 30 is the Montgomery, so you had that in the beginning, but it never had a transfer-of-benefits option to dependents attached to it. If you made a transfer of one month to each of your children, you switched to the Post 9/11 GI Bill (because that is the only current GI Bill that does have transfer benefits to dependents).

As far as what you were told – it was good advice as indeed if each child has received transferred benefits, you can give each one more benefits later, even after you have retired. But, if you would not have given each child at least one month of entitlement while you were serving, you could not give them any benefits after retiring. You had a very good counselor and should consider yourself lucky as many of them do not understand this limitation.

You can go back to school yourself using the Post 9/11 GI Bill. You initially had 36 months of MGIB benefits. The balance you will have left will be minus what you used for Top-Up and the one month you gave each child, so you probably have left around 32 months of benefits. Most likely you have at least 27 months and that would be enough for three years of school. Being you already have an AA, you most likely only need an additional two years to get your four-year degree.

I would say get your Bachelor’s Degree and then distribute what is left to your children. Keep in mind you only have 15 years from your date of discharge to use your benefits and your children only have up to age 26 to use their transferred benefits or they lose them (and they don’t automatically revert back to you, however you can revoke them at any time).

Well Brad, they are your entitlements to manage as you want. You didn’t say how old your kids were, but if they do not use their Post 9/11 GI Bill transferred benefits by age 26, they will expire and even you will not be able to use them. So if they are approaching that age, or an age to where they do not have enough time left to use up the benefits you gave them, then you might be better off revoking them and using them yourself.

With the Post 9/11 GI Bill, it is hard to put a dollar value on benefits. The way the New GI Bill works is if your kids attend a public school in their home state of residency, the VA pays all of their tuition and eligible fees. If they attend a school out of their home state, then the VA will pay the resident rate for that school and your kids would have to pay the difference between the resident rate and out-state rate. If your kids attended a private school, then the VA would pay up to $17,500 each year in tuition/fees.

In addition, each kid would get a housing allowance that is based on the zip code of their school and the number of credits they are taking. Once each semester, the kids would each get a book stipend calculated at $41.67 per credit.

To give you one example of a dollar amount one kid would loose, let’s say your kid is from Kansas. Kansas State University at Manhattan, KS charges $3,237 per semester for the resident tuition rate for 14 credit hours, which is the average number of credits students take each semester. The book stipend would be $583. The housing allowance for Manhattan, KS runs $1,068 per month. So for a semester, your kid would lose:

• $3,237 – tuition
• $583 – book stipend
• $4,272 – four months of housing allowance
• Total – $8,092 per semester

If you are residents on either the East or West Coasts, the housing allowance is about double of what it is in the Midwest.

If you already have your private pilot’s license, then the VA would pay up to $10,000 per year for you to attend flight school.