Hubby just transferred GI Bill funds over to me for college effective August 1! Whoo hoo!!!

We have an appointment with the Veterans Counselor to get the ball rolling and see how all this works, so I'll let you know as soon as I have a better understanding of it all.

Great. would be nice to have a blow by blow experience

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Originally posted by Mrsjvb:
Great. would be nice to have a blow by blow experience

true, but every branch will still have its differences in policy

good luck lhr!

Thanks Catherine! I'm excited.

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Originally posted by LadyHarleyRider:
Hubby just transferred GI Bill funds over to me for college effective August 1! Whoo hoo!!!

We have an appointment with the Veterans Counselor to get the ball rolling and see how all this works, so I'll let you know as soon as I have a better understanding of it all.

Is your hubby active duty?

Good luck with the process!

It will be nice to see how it works out for you - we may do the same thing for me but not for at least a year or two - so its been off of our radar for the time being.

Good luck and I hope it goes smoothly.

quote:

Originally posted by tennismom:

quote:

Originally posted by LadyHarleyRider:
Hubby just transferred GI Bill funds over to me for college effective August 1! Whoo hoo!!!

We have an appointment with the Veterans Counselor to get the ball rolling and see how all this works, so I'll let you know as soon as I have a better understanding of it all.

Is your hubby active duty?

Yes he is. Hubby is in the AGR program. Has been for 18+ years.

Ok, now the VA put a wrench in the works. They did not read the paperwork correctly that hubby submitted and assumed his AGR was National Guard so they only counted the "active" time while he was deployed to Iraq for a year. OMG. My husband was livid!!!

So Sunday, he wrote a "nice" (HA!) letter to the VA explaining that the AGR program he is in qualifies for the GI Bill and his active duty time includes the 18 plus years that he has been in. Along with that letter, he submitted a copy of all of his orders for the past 18 years as proof. He demanded that they fix this immediately. We overnighted the letter to the VA yesterday. He also called the VA yesterday explaining their mistake and let them know the package is in the mail to them. They said to him, "Oh, we thought you were Guard. We made a mistake." Damn straight they did!

I don't know if this is a stalling tactic of the VA to be paying out benefits or what but we are not happy.

If any of your spouses are AGR, make sure the VA doesn't screw you over. AGR National Guard do not qualify for the GI Bill tuition benefits but AGR Title 10 are. Title 10 are the most of the population of AGR's.

(This is Army we are talking about.)

Now, our benefits may be postponed til the VA gets this straightened out. Thank goodness I have back up financial aid.

Probably an honest mistake. Tehy're processing tons of applications right now, many for people who don't qualify (but live in a magical world where they "deserve" benefits because the only time they were activated in 8 years was to go to school and then get extended to get medical issues non-service connected fixed......sorry, sidetrack)

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I don't know if this is a stalling tactic of the VA to be paying out benefits or what but we are not happy.

VA does not stall - they want to pay as many people benefits as possible, as fast as possible, because Congress is demanding progress reports from them - stalling is the opposite of what they are doing right now for any part of the Post 9/11 GI Bill benefits -
however - please remember that they just hired a couple of hundred new employees for each regional processing office and they are processing these applications WHILE they are still being trained. So there are going to be some growing pains. Please be patient with them.

quote:

Originally posted by catherine0830:
Probably an honest mistake. Tehy're processing tons of applications right now, many for people who don't qualify (but live in a magical world where they "deserve" benefits because the only time they were activated in 8 years was to go to school and then get extended to get medical issues non-service connected fixed......sorry, sidetrack)

Normally in July for the past several years the Dept of Va Education Branch will have a weekly report showing approx. 25,000 outstanding claims to be processed - last friday they were showing 159,000 claims pending to be processed - so their workload has more than quadruled plus training all the new employees - and they have placed the employees on mandatory 30 hour per week overtime and working claims on saturdays.

Thank you RetiredCareerCousel. I didn't mean to offend the VA but you can understand how annoyed we were when we got the letter in the mail stating we were only elible for 60% of benefits because hubby only spent 1 year on active duty while in Iraq. When, as I stated above, he has been in for 18+ years. Because of this "mistake", our tuition benefits are now set back. Hubby, myself and my daughter are all in college and have been waiting for the GI Bill college benefits for quite some time now.

I was making others aware of this because apparently, this is going to cause a lot of confusion with the VA. When the VA sees "Guard", some of them are automatically going to assumed National Guard and not Active Guard Reserve, which is the AGR. This mistake may cause delays in benefits.

I do appreciate the hard work of the VA. However, there should be a check system to make sure the benefits are being processed correctly.

We are still waiting for the VA to make the corrections to our GI Bill tuition benefits. Over a month now. Hmmmmm.........

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Originally posted by LadyHarleyRider:
We are still waiting for the VA to make the corrections to our GI Bill tuition benefits. Over a month now. Hmmmmm.........

Normally an appeal to correct an error such as this takes 60 days to process.

LHR

I found this in another thread in the education forums. Not sure if it applies to you

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Just to add fuel for the fire If you are an AGR which is an Active Guard Reserve. This is also active duty Title 32 you do not qualify for the Post 9/11 GI Bill. Kind of sad because you recruit someone who is going into the reserves and they go to basic and then MOS training and this is over 90 days title 10 they qualify for it. What this means is that you have to be on title 10 orders for more than 90 days so if you are a full time employee for the Guard you don't qualify unless you got mobilized.

Thanks Catherine. Actually it doesn't apply to me, thankfully. The information is somewhat misleading that the person posted. Hubby was deployed for a year so he qualifies as Title 10.

On another note, I got my letter from the VA that they received my education benefits application and are processing it. Could take weeks to a few months. They said that they have a huge back up of applications.

The official word on processing claims was changed this week by VA from 6 to 8 weeks processing time to 8 to 10 weeks. I've been calling 3 times a day for my students who were certified early August, havn't been paid, and are now well past the 6 week time frame.

Hopefully the VA will catch up soon, they just moved alot of their telephone operators over to processing payments which should help alot.

Thanks for the update RCC.

I also read this recent article published by mil.com that explains the back up.

Back up on GI Bill tuition payments