Military Housing; Pros and Cons

I have been in two diferent types of military housing. One was off base and the houses, were like town houses, they were touching. That one was terrible because the walls were papper thin. We didn't get along with our neighbors because of it. The other is where I live now. It's on base, and it's like a town house but it's only two houses together and the walls are not thin. This is nicer.

Anyway, when you live on base you don't have to pay rent or utilities, but you don't get your BAH (Basic allowance for housing). What is better? To live off base and rent from someone and get the BAH and pay utilities, or live on base and not get the BAH? Well I prefer to live off base, because you get the whole BAH whether you use it or not. I have lived off base and rented, where my rent was only $500 a month and utilities were included. Well at the time our BAH was about $800 a month (we were in Texas and housing is cheap out there). So I got to keep the extra.

Having that extra money helped alot, since my husband was only a E-2. Now we are currently in WA and the cost of housing is much more. We should be getting about $1200 for BAH, but we live on base. So what do you think? Live on base or off? Our next duty station will most likly be CA, which the cost out there is overpriced. We should get about $1800 and I think I'll live off base there, since we save money that way and I can shop around. Oh yeah, and I found the Texas place on rent.com, which I highly reccomend.