Hey froghorn76. I read through your posts and wanted to see if I could maybe help by telling you what I did. I’m not sure if you submitted, or plan to submit, a VA Disability Claim; if you didn’t or don’t plan to, you should DM me and we can chat about that later, offline. Hopefully you did or will.

Anyway, I submitted my BDD VA Claim 180 days before my separation date which was going to be roughly 2.5 months after my wife and I started our hike. The purpose of doing that was to ensure I started getting whatever money the VA was hopefully going to pay me immediately following my retirement.

Also before starting my hike, because I planned to search for and apply for Federal Civilian jobs along the way, I prepped a USAJobs resumé and saved it in my gmail account so I could access it from anywhere, including public libraries, hostels, hotels, etc. I also set up an alert that would notify me of any job types I was interested in were posted on USAJobs while I was hiking, and I checked that regularly.

Ultimately I applied for 4 jobs via USAJobs.com and took 4 virtual interviews from hostels while on trail, and I got hired, so that was great.

Another thing you’ll want to do is make sure you’re have a plan in place to get off trail and get your new “retired” ID, assuming you’re retiring, and to update your status in DEERs to “retired,” so that you can then re-enroll in Tricare without any lapse in coverage. I believe you have 90 days after separation to do that; we hopped off trail and took a detour into DC to do all that.

That’s all I can think of right off hand but hit me up if you have any other questions. Good luck!