Life as a military spouse moves fast: deployments, a growing family and countless relocations. For Monique Street, each challenge shaped a career devoted to military families — from guiding them through financial decisions to championing their needs in conversations with policymakers.
As an undergraduate student at Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University, Street knew she wanted a career in financial services. But just a year after graduating, she was thrust into an unfamiliar life as a military spouse, experiencing firsthand the challenges her future clients would face.
"I didn't know the first thing about the military," Street, a relationship manager at AAFMAA Wealth & Trust and one of
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At first, military life and financial services felt like two separate worlds, Street said. But as she faced her own challenges as a military spouse, she began to see how the two could intersect.
"As I started to try and manage our own family's finances, and I saw how difficult it was to understand, … I started to [think] that, 'Hey, maybe this is something that I want to educate myself on,'" Street said. "And then it became a natural next step to want to educate others as well."
Still, making that step wasn't simple.
"Our life got chaotic from day one. We had lots of relocations. We constantly moved. I found myself getting ready to give birth to our first child shortly before he was deploying, so I had to solo-parent initially, and all the while trying to figure out how I'm going to maintain this career in the financial services industry," Street said. "I stumbled across a certification from FINRA specifically for military spouses. It was a fellowship that allowed us to obtain the accredited financial counselor, or AFC, designation."
With that designation, Street began her career as a Department of Defense-contracted financial counselor, helping service members and their spouses understand budgeting, debt management and military benefits on Army bases.
Over 11 years of marriage, Street and her family have packed up and moved six times. That constant relocation often made it feel nearly impossible to advance her career, she said.
Eager to expand her expertise, Street returned to school in 2020, where she earned a master's degree in family financial planning and counseling from the University of Alabama.
As a member of the military community, Street said she felt uniquely positioned to provide financial guidance to military families.
"I really felt like branching into this space from my background allowed me to approach this from a different aspect, where I can lean into building that trust," Street said. "Military benefits can be quite complex, and the average planner, if they don't have that familiarity with those benefits, may not be fully prepared to provide services to this community."
Running parallel to her work with individual clients, Street found herself working as an advocate for military families on a much larger scale.
"The political advocacy piece was something that shocked me," she said. "I did not see myself naturally ending up in that space. However, when I was working as a counselor, I would say that was the first time that I saw myself getting into that seat of advocating for the military families."
While working as a financial counselor on Army bases, Street began to identify a problem with a new retirement system that was being rolled out to certain service members.
Street noticed that some young officers weren't fully informed about changes to their retirement options. As a result, certain service members missed out on benefits they were entitled to, only realizing later that they hadn't received the matching contributions they expected.
"I started working with individuals … at Fort Campbell who were experiencing this. I found a point of contact that was up at the Pentagon, reached out to them, and we started working through a strategy to get this fixed for them," Street said.
Quickly, Street's coworkers began to send her more of these overlooked officers as they came across them in their work.
"It turned into a situation where I was able to train my peers, because there were more people than I could help out myself," she said. "I would say that that was one of the first times that I really saw myself in more of an advocacy seat."
As a woman of color working on military bases, Street found herself in a unique position, one that often extended beyond her role as a financial counselor.
"Even though I was there as a financial counselor, many women would come to me to talk about much more personal issues. In those conversations, we uncovered challenges that went beyond finances — including instances of sexual harassment within their units," she said. "I was able to walk alongside them and connect them with the support they needed to take action. Those moments affirmed something I carry with me today: When women and military spouses are present in this field, we open doors. Sometimes we feel more comfortable opening up to each other, and that trust can bring hidden challenges to light."
Through her advocacy, Street has worked with government officials to tackle systemic challenges faced by military families, from gaps in retirement policy and food insecurity to employment barriers for military spouses.
In 2023, she was selected as the J.P. Morgan Chase DEPLOY Financial Wellness Fellow with Blue Star Families, a national nonprofit that focuses on providing services to the military and veteran community. There, she researched ways to improve job accessibility for military spouses.
"Military spouse employment is one of those things that impacts the financial wellness of our families, because I myself have experienced this, where a relocation impacts my ability to keep a job," Street said. "That automatically shifts our income downward, and we have to learn how to adjust to having less income, and so that was something that I really focused on during the fellowship."
Now, in her work as a relationship manager at AAFMAA Wealth & Trust, Street works with older service members and veterans to provide comprehensive financial planning.
"We are working with those military clients who have already started to maybe build some wealth for themselves and their families, but they're looking to figure out what those next steps are," Street said. "We do try and keep our minimum … investable assets on the lower end of what you would typically see in our industry, because most of our military families are self-made in a sense. They're not, you know, inheriting large sums of wealth. They're really building this for themselves and their families as they go."
Even as Street continues to progress in her day job, her advocacy work shows no signs of slowing down. Earlier this year, Gov. Wes Moore appointed her as the first military spouse member of Maryland's Military Installation Council, where she works to highlight and address the financial realities faced by military families.
Balancing family life and her day job can make her advocacy work exhausting at times, Street said. But taking on that role, she said, is simply part of who she is.
"I think it has just been kind of ingrained into who I am as a person," she said. "Some of that is organic, and some of that is also just maybe me understanding the complexity around these situations, and knowing that sometimes it can be difficult for others to articulate. … I just enjoy kind of bridging those gaps where necessary."
