In addition to getting payments going back to your application date, you can get up to 12 months of retroactive payments for the year prior to your application date (or your protective filing date, discussed below) -- if you were disabled that long ago.
Characters will receive one specialization point at level 7 and another at level 14. Specialization points can be saved for later levels or used mid-level (the Level Up button on the stats sheet will be active if there are unspent specialization points).
Another easy way of gaining points is by doing correspondence courses (Army online classes). If you max them out, you get 78 promotion points. Every 5 hour class correlates to 1 promotion point. Even though the classes are listed by how long they take, they do not take nearly that long.