TIP: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
March 7th, 2007 @ 2:16 pm by Mrs. Beetle
While you are working out every important detail of your big day (Tall centerpieces or short? Write our own vows or use the traditional ones? Band or DJ? yada, yada, yada…), I don’t want you to overlook a very important detail: what do you plan on doing with all of those checks/cash gifts you get after you say “I do”?
I don’t mean are you investing in a Money Market account or buying a 6 month CD, I’m talking about something much more immediate: who’s going to take care of depositing your checks if you’re leaving right away for your honeymoon?
In various parts of the country and for various ethnic groups, cash gifts are a big part of the wedding process. Mr. Beetle and I knew that we’d be getting quite a few “envelopes” on the night of our wedding and we wanted to be prepared. We were jetting off to Europe on the following Monday and we needed an action plan.
After researching the situation, we discovered that Washington Mutual has branches in both New York and California (where we were getting married). A week or so before the wedding, we opened an account at Wamu, for the express reason that we would be able to endorse and deposit all of our checks in Cali, before we left on our honeymoon to Italy. We did not want the worry and hassle of waiting the two weeks until we returned, and quite frankly, did not feel comfortable totaling up the checks and giving them to another family member to deposit for us (yep, we wanted a bit of privacy in this area).
Here are a few tips:
*Designate someone as the “envelope guy” or gal. Anytime someone hands you a gift, you can pass them along to this person to keep safe.
*Keep track of EVERYTHING! Before you deposit a single check, make sure you’ve made a careful list of who gave what. Keep your envelopes and cards, just in case–they might be helpful if you need to put together any “who gave us this?” puzzles later on.
*Do you have a joint account? Almost all your checks will be written out to “Mr. & Mrs…..” and you want to make sure you and your husband have a joint bank account in place so you can deposit all your dough.
*If you are leaving for your honeymoon on a weekend, ask someone you trust ahead of time to deposit your checks for you. If not, leave time in the morning to hit up the bank yourselves before you jet off on your honeymoon.
Have you come up with a wedding night/money gameplan?
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10 Responses to “TIP: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is”
When we got married a lot of the checks were written to Mr. & Mrs. John Smith or Jane and John Smith. We already had a joint account with Citibank under the Jane Maiden, John Smith and the bank had no problem depositing them.
This was actually very helpful….Thanks. My fiance and I are leaving for our honeymoon right away, and we havent set up a joint account yet. So I will make sure to do that. I think we will probably have my mother in law deposit our money for us.
thanks so much. this is one of the many things that could so easily be overlooked. FI and i each have accounts at the same bank but not a joint account yet. we’ll be sure to open one before the wedding so in the rush to drive the 300 miles home and get to the airport the next day we won’t be left in the lurch.
Hmm… what if we don’t have a joint account before the wedding? Should we open one? As I’ll be changing my name afterwards, I thought it would be easier to wait and open a joint account after, when all the name change stuff was taken care of!
Do any married bees have suggestions as to when they opened their joint accounts? Whether both people on the check have to be named in the account, or if the unnamed person can just endorse the check?
Hey girls:
As long as one of your names is on the check, you should be able to deposit them (you may want to double double check with your bank just to be absolutely sure). I think its a great idea to open the account BEFORE the wedding, for all of the reasons I’ve mentioned above. You can easily go back and switch your name later on (you can hold off on getting checks and just wait until your name change has gone through). Also (in a silly way), I think its sort of symbolic move and will help you both jumpstart thinking about your money as a couple. If you simply sign the checks and hand them over to someone, make sure they make a list for you…its so easy to forget to do this in the midst of all of the mayhem!
We had major problems with this. Checks written to Mr. XXXX and Mrs. XXXX were held because my name had not been offically changed to Mrs. XXXX. Primarily since it was an individual account (hubby’s). No joint accounts here. However checks written to Mr. XXXX or Mrs. XXXX didn’t seem to have a problem.
I don’t think I want anyone else dealing with our money… the whole privacy thing. Good thing for FH and I, our honeymoon is a cruise and will be totally paid for when we go, including shore excursions and travel costs. So we won’t need the money we get at the wedding during the honeymoon, and can wait until we get back from the trip to deposit everything.
Something I just thought of - if our guests who write us checks see that we deposited them within 24 hours of the wedding, would they see us as moneygrubbers or something? I mean, wouldn’t it come off as though we opened all the gifts, tossed aside the tangible ones, collected all the cash/checks, and made a mad dash for the bank before our honeymoon just to ensure they as guests didn’t suddenly change their minds and issue a stop-payment or something…
We kept all of our monetary gifts at my parents’ house and deposited the checks/cash when we got back from our honeymoon a week later. I deposited all checks made out to me in my own acct. DH deposited all checks made out to him as well as those made out to “Mr. and Mrs. XXX” in his own account. We had no problems depositing those checks because I just endorsed them with “Mrs. XXX” on the back even though I hadn’t changed my name yet (the bank teller told me to do this). After I got my name changed, we opened a joint acct, transferred all of our money into that and closed each of our individual accts.
I would also recommend marking numbers on the gifts (or putting numbered-stickers) on money envelopes, gift cards and gift boxes. A lot of the money envelopes we received was written in Chinese and that was a huge problem for us because we didn’t know how to read Chinese names - and our parents mostly did not know how to translate Chinese names into English name equivalents. If you mark the gift with a number and concurrently mark down the number of the gift down with the guest’s name on the registration checklist — you should have no problems identifying most of the gifts!
Mrs. Beetle, New York/Palm Desert
About: Mrs. Beetle previously wrote our weekly advice column. She got married in October 2006, and is currently guest blogging.
Mrs. Beetle, do we have to have our names changed to be allowed to accept the Mr. & Mrs. Kiwi checks? I mean, if our accounts are opened under Mr. Kiw and Miss Maiden Kiwi, can we still deposit the checks written out to Mr. & Mrs. Kiwi?