Military Families and Financial Stress

This report presents a comprehensive review of the literature regarding the ways families, especially military families, are impacted by and function in the context of financial stress. One way to conceptualize financial stress in families is to examine how financial stressors (e.g., loss of employment, unexpected major expenses) threaten families’ present and future security as well as their current and future freedom of choice (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 2015). Military families are a special subgroup of all families because their experiences of financial stress occur within the specific context of military service (Hosek & Wadsworth, 2013). Since stress from other areas in life (e.g., marriage, parenting, deployments, separation) interacts with financial stress to impact the functioning of families, in general, and military families, specifically, it is important to reduce financial stress to help lessen the family’s overall stress and improve their general functioning (Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress, 2016).