My grandfather, Joseph Mugnai Sr., started Family Magazine in 1958, shortly after leaving the Army. The idea was straightforward: military families were stretching every dollar, and he wanted to help them save at the commissary. The magazine has been on the shelves at military commissaries ever since, almost 70 years now.
My father joined the company in the 1980s, and I came on board in 2011. Across three generations, the mission has never changed: help military families, and give back to the community that supported our family from the start.
But somewhere along the way I started noticing a gap that bothered me.
The commissary savings were one thing, and we had that covered. What we didn’t have covered was everything else, all the money decisions a military family has to make that nobody ever really explains. The Basic Allowance for Housing. The TSP match. What you’re actually owed when you PCS. Which state your spouse should pay taxes in. These benefits are real and they’re worth real money, but the rules change by rank, by state, and by year. DFAS tables, JTR chapters, IRS elections.
I know how hard it is because I went looking for those answers myself. Every time I tried to pin down how one of these actually worked, I’d end up with 10 browser tabs open, half of them outdated, the other half contradicting each other, and no clear answer at the end. And I do this for a living. If it’s that hard for someone who works with this information every day, it’s far harder for a young family working through the same questions at midnight after the kids are down, with a PCS coming and thousands of dollars on the line. They go looking online, and most of what they find is out of date, oversimplified or quietly trying to sell them a loan. That’s the part that got me. People are trying to do right by their family, but are getting steered by whoever paid the most for the ad.
So in 2025 I built Garrison Ledger.
The idea was to make the complicated simple, and to do it honestly. Free tools that show a family what they’re actually owed, with every number traced back to its official source. When our BAH calculator gives you a figure, you can see it came from the DFAS table. When our tax tool tells you something, you can see the law behind it. Nothing to buy, and we don’t steer anyone to a lender. And when we’re not certain about something, we say so, because the alternative is letting a family make a five-figure decision on a number we made up.
That honesty matters more than anything. There are tools and chatbots now that will hand you a confident answer to a military money question and be flat wrong. On your pay and your family’s future, a confident wrong answer is worse than no answer at all. Everything we build is designed so you never have to take our word for it. You can check the source yourself.
I work on this day and night. I believe military families deserve a place they can trust to give them the straight answer, sourced and free, and I’m going to keep building it until they have it.
That’s the whole story. Same family, same mission my grandfather started in 1958, just a new way to help.
If you want to see what we built, the tools are free at garrisonledger.com. Come check your own numbers.
Joe Mugnai is the third-generation associate publisher at FamilyMedia, the family-owned company behind Family Magazine (in military commissaries since 1958) and Garrison Ledger, a free, independent military-finance resource where every figure traces to its official source.
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