Our Creator's Story
I'm a financially literate person who spends his career around money and military benefits — and I still missed one of the most straightforward deductions available to me for more than five years. This is the mistake that made me build this site.
The deduction I didn't know I had
I drive 360 miles round trip to drill — 180 miles each way — at least once a month. For years I did that drive, paid for that gas, and never once thought the trip was deductible. Nobody told me. It wasn't until I'd been in for over five years that I learned members of the Guard and Reserve who travel more than 100 miles to drill can deduct that travel above the line, whether or not they itemize.
When I finally ran the numbers on what I'd missed, it stung.
What five years of not knowing cost me
The deduction uses the IRS standard mileage rate, multiplied by the miles you drive to drill. At 360 miles round trip, once a month, that's about 4,320 miles a year. In round numbers, that worked out to roughly $2,800 a year — around $14,000 in deductions over five years that I'll never get back.
And that's from mileage alone — it doesn't even count the lodging and meal per diem I could have claimed on top. What it actually saves in tax depends on your bracket, but the deduction dollars are the deduction dollars.
Why I built this
Making service members aware of the great, lesser-known military benefits has always been a passion of mine. I'd spent years helping people understand their pay and benefits, and I'd still left thousands of dollars on the table because no simple tool existed to answer the one question a reservist actually has in April: what is this worth on my return?
So I built one. I wanted to make sure no other reservist made the same mistake I did.
My promise to you
This site is, and always will be, a 100% free tool. No signups. No account. Your entries stay in your browser, and we don't sell your data. It's just a way to help service members keep money that's rightfully theirs.
If it helps even one soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, or Guardsman claim a deduction they didn't know they had, it was worth building.