When Air Force Tech. Sgt. Larry Kight was a young recruit eight years ago, he got his first taste of an enemy he hadn't reckoned with: money.

Just 18 and flush with his first full-time paycheck, Kight said, he immediately went shopping for a used car. But he collided with a sobering reality: Dealers right off the base were showing him auto loans with staggering interest rates, as high as 20 percent.

"I knew it wasn't good. To pay off the car in five years, I'd be paying almost double the asking price," Kight recalls.

He walked away, but too often saw many of his fellow soldiers get sucked into bad loans.

"It's the normal pitfalls facing young people today," said Kight. "They don't have enough financial education to know about their credit score or high interest rates or the real amount they're paying on a loan."

Today, the Travis Air Force Base sergeant is an advocate for the U.S. military's recent efforts to better equip its people with money-saving skills.

Like many American households, some military families have been squeezed by rapidly rising prices for gas and groceries, as well as plummeting home values that affect mortgages and their ability to borrow.

But they're also more vulnerable to predatory lending. They are three times more likely than civilians to take out so-called payday loans that charge exorbitant interest rates — as high as 400 percent, according to a 2006 federal Department of Defense report.

These lenders often target military personnel, especially young recruits with their first full-time paychecks. Last year, a California task force report noted that Oceanside, Calif., home to the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base, has more payday lenders than any other ZIP code in the state.

To combat the problem, the Department of Defense two years ago launched "Military Saves," a promotional campaign to "persuade, motivate and encourage" military families to be savers. Both Congress and California have passed bills to cap annual percentage rates at 36 percent for these types of loans to military personnel.

There's more at stake than losing the house.

Under military law, service members can be discharged or even jailed for running up excessive amounts of debt. And chronic debt-to-income imbalances can jeopardize their national security clearances.

According to a 2007 California task force report, Navy discharges due to debt increased a whopping 903 percent, from 194 in 2000 to 1,999 in 2005.

National Guard Sgt. Jerry Pera, an Auburn, Calif., native who ships off to Kosovo in January, said, "Everyone in military service needs to be vigilant on what kind of financial transaction they're getting into." His advice: "Read the fine print."