Wedding Planning

Climbing Out of the Debt Rut: Debtor’s History

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

A Bride digging her way out of a rut
Whether it happened due to a little too much retail therapy, some emergency expenses or just a lack of a good relationship with money and credit, it’s not unheard-of that you have a bit of debt to pay off.

Or maybe more than a bit.

Wanting to start the next chapter of your life debt-free (so you can turn right around and get a mortgage, right?) is an admirable goal and, depending on the size of your debt and how much time you’ve got before that page turns, it may even be possible!

After my first divorce (the one where we divided up liabilities as we had no real assets to speak of) I had a couple of credit cards, a new car payment and a small loan from my boss we’d taken out to pay for car repairs (for the now-ex’s car… somehow that got forgotten in the divvying up process, but whatever). And then I decided it was time to go back to school and incurred quite the student loan balance over those 2 years. After finishing school and going into my chosen field I was so upside down it was scary.

Threatening to repossess my car scary.

Because I wasn’t making enough to pay both my rent and my car payment in the same month on top of my other bills (and I’d run out of extensions) I did two very important things: I went back to my old job making a steadier paycheck and sought the help of one of those Debt Management Companies.

The upside of that last bit was that they got my interest rates reduced and negotiated a payment plan that got the various companies off my back so I could pay the other bits without sweating so much. The downside is that those cards would be cancelled the moment they were paid off and my credit rating took a hit because of the negotiations. At that point, though, I figured my credit couldn’t get much worse and I had time to rebuild.

And rebuild I did! I even got pretty good at living within my means with no credit cards for many years. And then I got a little cocky, got approved for a couple of accounts and got myself a bit topsy turvy again.

Some lessons take more than one time to learn, huh?

While I could bore you with the details, it’s enough to say I didn’t manage my funds as well as I could have. That, plus losing a contract job that cut my monthly income by 25% put me into a bit of a tailspin. I could make the minimum payments on everything, plus a little more spread around, so the situation wasn’t/isn’t dire, but I finally got to the point where I was fed up and ready to change things.

With the wedding coming up it strengthened my resolve to dig myself out of the pit I’d dug over the last however-many years without needing outside help or jeopardizing my credit report.

Pretty Book and Flower Icon

 

Does this sound at all familiar to you?
How much are you willing to do to get out of debt? 

Account-ability

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

image via stock.xchng | photography by nosheep

Once we’d decided how we were going to pay for the wedding, we both assumed that it was best to just set up a joint savings account at the bank we already used, that way we could easily transfer funds into and out of it as needed.

Then it occurred to me that, just maybe, it might be better to set up a joint checking account instead of a savings account. After all, while we were giving ourselves a certain amount of lead-time, eventually we’re going to be needing to take funds out on a regular basis to cover deposits and other purchases. Some savings accounts might allow a few withdrawals a month with no penalty, but towards the end that might be a problem.

A checking account it is, right? Until I actually looked it up and learned our bank charges a nominal fee for accounts not hooked to a minimum direct deposit or a $1500 balance. Um, yeah, not so good for starting out our wedding fund.

So the search was on–does anyone offer fee-free checking anymore? Not at the big banks, it turns out. But if you start looking local (and don’t forget about any credit unions you might be able to join) you can usually find a couple of options out there.

The thing is, you have to weigh the costs over the convenience. Our bank only charged $5 a month for balances under $1500–not extravagant, by any means, but a charge nonetheless. Putting away a couple hundred dollars a month means the fee would only be applied for the first few months, but when you’re on a tight budget, even a little bite could be uncomfortable.

Still, is $5 a month worth the time it would take to set up an account at an unfamiliar bank and drive over our deposits on the odd lunch break? If we went with another bank, it would need to be one with convenient ATM machines or–better yet–Saturday hours for when we needed cash for certain expenses. Not to mention the hassle of closing a new account.

But we’re online folks–the more we can do from our laptops the better. What kind of options are there? Well, first we considered a PayPal account. About the only thing you can’t do is write checks directly from the account, which may or may not be important to your vendors, but it does allow ease of deposits and transfers and a MasterCard Debit Card for most other purchases.

Another option was ING Direct–they offer both online savings and checking accounts, you can link up to 3 personal checking accounts to your online checking for ease of transfers, an ATM network with no fees and the ability to write checks against your account. Sounds like a definite contender to me!

Whatever route you decide to take, it’s helpful to have one place set aside to keep track of wedding expenses and available budget. Whether a piggy bank, a savings account or one credit card you use and then pay off each month.

Where are you stocking your wedding day funds?
Any options I haven’t listed here that maybe I should have? 

Building Out the Budget

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning
House bank with a deposit going in

image via stock.xchng | photography by iprole

When deciding what type of wedding we wanted to have in our pre-gaged state, we knew we didn’t want this big, huge formal wedding but we did want more than just a courthouse ceremony and dinner afterwards.

We wanted a party.

I love throwing a good party and, thankfully, Mr. RT shares my enthusiasm for these sorts of things, so a celebration is not something we’ll willingly forgo. Whereas the usual party funds can be eked out over a couple of months, I’m thinking even a low-key wedding is going to cost more than our usual party budget and, this time, I’m definitely not doing my own catering!

Which brings us back to saving up over time, a benefit we have due to our longer-than-the-usual long engagement.

Confession: I’ve never been good at saving. I never really learned how!

Money was tight, growing up, and what came in almost always immediately went out. Whereas my brother grew up in the same home and was absolutely rabid about his piggy bank (we used to call him Alex P. Keaton-in training), I just never got the memo and, as an adult, not much has changed.

Still, I have learned that if I have a specific goal in mind I do much better than trying to save for some nebulous whatever.

And during the second half of 2011 I managed to get a good start to my savings plan.

But aside from the budgeted savings, what else can be done to help supplement that starter budget built by monthly savings alone?

I’ve known grooms who have taken fast food jobs at night in order to afford a nice honeymoon for after the wedding, but getting a part-time job might not be a) the easiest thing these days and b) most effective with everything else I’ve got going on.

Are you crafty? Do friends rave about things you make? Maybe an etsy store is a way for you to put your talents to good use. I have plans for one of my own plus other projects that may well net some additional wedding funds over the length of our engagement.

Maybe you’ve got a lot of items in your closets and garage and it’s time for a garage sale or an eBay blitz? Or register for items that you can use for the wedding as well as later (though I understand some etiquette mavens frown on that).

You could check and see if your bank offers a rounding-up savings plan–you know the ones, right? Every time you use your debit card (which is every grocery and gas and whatever trip, for me), they’ll round up your transaction to the nearest whole dollar and put that “spare change” into your savings account. Some banks even match those coins for a certain introductory period. It’s a high-tech version of saving your change in a pickle jar–though there’s something to be said for that, too!

And speaking of debit cards: does your debit or credit card have any points options available? And can you exchange those points for gift cards? Might as well put those points to good use, right?

But the real goal is to have a wedding that suits your style and budget without having to open a wedding credit card or get a loan to cover expenses. What’s NOT the best way to start out a life together? More debt!

How are you planning to supplement your initial budget?

Robbing Florals to Pay Rings

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

Wedding rings on top of cash

aka Figuring out just how your going to pay for what you want

Research weddings for any amount of time and you’ll get more than you ever wanted to know about where the budget should be spent. I despise the word “should.” Should implies that I have to do something because that’s how other people did it. And while I’m not one to have a problem with authority, I do take umbrage with those who pretend to know what I want more than me.

But having something like this sample budget allotment does give us a good place to start, so I’m not going to throw the budget out with the bathwater.

Here’s the basic breakdown for our $5K Wedding, as suggested by The Knot and Real Simple:

Reception $2425-2500
(including venue, rentals, food and beverage)

Attire $500
(bride and groom clothes and accessories)

Flowers/Decorations$500
(if it doesn’t come with the site, it goes here)

Music $400-500
(dj or band or your ipod and some speakers)

Photos & Videos $500-600
(includes the prints, too)

Favors & Gifts $150
(for guests, attendants and each other)

Ceremony $100-130
(site and officiant fees)

Stationery $150
(anything paper that gets mailed or handed-out)

Rings $100
(self-explanatory)

Transportation $50-150
(limos, valets and any hotel rooms for the bride and groom)

The biggest difference between the two suggested allotments were between music and photos: The Knot prefers photos to music and Real Simple considered them equal contenders.

Now, some of those amounts are absolutely laughable: $100 for 2 wedding bands?! Sure, I could find them like that online from some warehouse but we might have to monkey things around just a bit. Like maybe going the iPod route instead of a dj and freeing up those funds for other uses, and having the ceremony and reception at the same venue so as to avoid car rentals, 2 location fees and who knows what else.

We do agree that the reception taking up half the budget makes sense as one of our priorities is good food and drinks. Meanwhile flowers will probably get nixed altogether in favor of less-perishable, more economical options made by moi, as will pretty much all the stationery needs. That doesn’t mean we get to totally zero out those ledger lines, there will still be expenses involved (like stamps!), but they will be much less than these estimates with the rest made up in “sweat equity.”

And while there’s still the possibility of adding more to the budget (funds, not expenditures) by the time it’s all said and done, I don’t really have a problem being a couple with more time than money to pull off this wedding.

Pretty Book and Flower Icon

Does your proposed budget make you shudder? 
Or are you, like us, determined to make it work? 

A Laughable Amount

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

Jar with coins inside

Since one of the pluses to a long engagement is the ability to save up for the wedding expenses over time, perhaps it’s time to broach the subject of exactly what our budget is. After all, budget it one of the big three to decide early on, along with when and where, and can have quite a bit to do with the latter.

I firmly believe that your wedding can be as lavish as you want; it doesn’t matter if it’s your first or your fifth. Whatever you want–as long as you can afford it–go for it.

And while Todd and I are a double-income-no-kids household, in possession of good jobs and able pay our bills every month a wedding budget wasn’t really something we’d planned on needing, oh, ever. Since I changed the rules, so to speak, on that topic, we had to confront the issue that if we wanted a wedding, we would need to pay for it.

Being the non-saver of our duo, I had to take a hard look at what I could realistically save up over the next 2 years and a bit. I figured $100 a month would be tight for me (for reasons I’ll get to in another post) but I could do it. That sounds like a lot, right?

Um, yeah. $2500. Double that because Todd is already adept at saving and I’m insisting we do this equally and you’ve got our starting wedding budget: $5000. (Okay, because we started saving before the engagement was official, it’s more in the $5500 range but let’s be cautious because, well, it’s me. And while there are plans for being able to increase that amount, it’s our bare-bones budget and the safe number to work from.)

I’ll sigh while you laugh.

But I know we can do it! It may not be easy as pie but I’m convinced it’ll all work out okay, we’ll just have to do a few things that every bride and groom have had to do since the beginning of time, even those with unlimited budgets:

  1. Prioritize
  2. Shop Smart
  3. Make Some Sacrifices

Plus, we’ve got a few things on our side:

  1. Small guest list–we’re talking a cap of 50 people, including us!
  2. I’m an inveterate crafter with my own in-home studio (own my own Gocco and everything) and Todd is quite handy with tools and such.
  3. We don’t want a big massive show-stopper of an event, just a good party to celebrate this next step in our lives together.

Next thing is to figure out how to allocate our meager funds to make sure we get not the perfect wedding, but a wedding that’s perfectly us!

Pretty Book and Flower Icon

 

How did you figure out how much your wedding budget would be?