COLA remains flat across most of Europe

[unhappycamper]

COLA remains flat across most of Europe
By Matt Millham, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Saturday, December 1, 2007

Don’t expect anything extra holiday shopping money in your next paycheck: Cost-of-living allowances paid to U.S. troops in Europe will not change at most bases for the first half of December.

At a small number of locales in Italy and Belgium, modest increases in COLA go into effect Saturday. The changes resulted from exchange-rate adjustments, according to the Defense Department’s Per Diem, Travel and Transportation Allowance Committee’s Web site.

Troops stationed at those bases will notice the adjustments in their midmonth pay.

But COLA will remain flat for at least the next two weeks at all locations where significant numbers of U.S. troops are based in the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain.

At Aviano Air Base, Italy, where COLA went up by about 11 percent in the middle of November, the allowance jumps about another 5 percent on Saturday.

An Aviano-based E-5 with four years of service living off base with two dependents will get $442.75 in COLA for the first 15 days of December, up from $421.67 for the last 15 days of November.


Rest of article at: http://stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=50653



uhc comment: The current exchange rate is $1.4639 for one Euro.

[MADem]

1. Remember when the Euro was 98 cents? IIII NT

[unhappycamper]

2. I was in Germany for about two weeks when Tricky Dick took the US

off the gold standard. That was about a 25% immediate pay cut. :grr:

[MADem]

3. And that was before the more responsive COLA system they have today, too! NT