I have not had much interaction (ok, not enough) with people in the armed forces, but here is a list of problems that many of them have spoken about..let me list them:

1. Forces people are not money concerned: It is one thing being money minded and a completely different thing to mind your own money. Sadly people in defence forces just do not bother about money. They think that they are earning enough, saving enough, and have adequate insurance, pension, etc. so the ‘money’ awareness is not their priority, forget financial literacy.
2. Employer does very little to teach them about the need for financial planning, goal setting, etc. So there is no help from there.
3. They keep getting posted to various places – this makes it difficult to build relationships with people who can help.
4. Managing money during a foreign posting or difficult postings like Siachen is impossible as they cannot even communicate with the advisor, if any.
5. Trusting the bank manager: Defence people understand life risk, but cannot understand how they can buy a bad product from a government owned bank which is hawking a product designed by a government owned life insurance company and approved by the government regulator. This means a huge portfolio of sub optimal products like Unit linked and Classic endowment plans.
6. Too many bank accounts: Every posting creates a new bank account, fixed deposit, and obviously a locker for valuables !!
7. Trusting the fellow man in uniform: many ex forces people are trapped into selling bad financial products – so the agent goes around selling bad financial products to his colleagues and ex colleagues. Comes from point no. 1 – not enough knowledge to verify whether the product is good. They realize that they have been cheated only when the scheme falls..
8. Buying a lot of useless, expensive products and ruining their finances.
9. Defence spouses have a huge challenge in creating a career for themselves – outside of the armed forces – so a major source of income – spousal income is lost to defence people.
10. Having no clue of how to seek and get good, responsible financial advice.
11. Managing a career transition to civil life – not easy at all. They are mostly unprepared.
12. Managing the financial expectations of the children – in terms of cash flow for their demands is not easy, media does not help.

surely there are other problems…but these are the ones which came to top of my mind…