DITY Move: How to find out if it is worth it

When the subject of DITY (now called PPM) moves comes to the table, one can receive mixed opinions. One opinion highlights the profits you can make and the full control that it gives you, but others think that it is not worth the hassle. Let's find out if it is really worth it or not.



My first ever military DITY move (now called PPM) was done before my marriage with my military man. At that time, I had no idea about the procedure of a DITY move and all the paperwork that is required. I drove down from college in NY to assist my spouse move from TX to FL, and afterwards I returned back to my normal life.

Without doing any research on the topic, my spouse went ahead and decided to do a full DITY move. He was assured that it was a good decision and that we would make a good amount of money from it. We contacted our private moving company and they informed us that they would come to our house sometime in the morning (8 am - 5 pm). So we were sensible and we woke up at 7 am waiting for our moving company to show up. We ended up waiting for them till noon, when they told us that we were the third family on their schedule. To clarify things, at that time we only had a single-bedroom apartment with a low number of furniture. What seemed to be an easy 3-hour job, ended up keeping us on the move till 6 pm.

As I told you, we didn't know anything about DITY moves so we ran into problems like invalid weight tickets etc.

After 5 military moves and 8 years of happy living with my spouse, we got more informed. We learned what a partial-DITY move is, how to properly estimate our HHG weight, and we got informed about all paperwork required by the TMO office. But still, we always catch ourselves asking the same critical questions. Is it worth it? Should we do a full DITY, partial DITY, or no DITY at all?

The critical question: Is it worth it to do a DITY move or not? 

The short answer is yes. But there is more to it. Military DITY moves don't make as much profit as they used to. Over the course of the past years, new limiting regulations showed up and the JTR changed quite a bit. Also, payment rates like per diem and payment per pound saw a decrease over the recent years. For that reason, these days it's nearly impossible to make the tens-of-thousands of profit that some DITY movers were claiming 10 years back. However, we still think that doing a DITY move is worth the hassle, even if you end up with a smaller profit. If you want to calculate this possible profit, you can use our DITY Move Calculator.