Weddingbee Blog

When Mr. Husky leaves his office this afternoon, it will be for the last time. He has been working under contract status ever since we moved from the Northwest, almost two years ago. The contract is coming to an end, and will not be renewed. We prepared ourselves for the potentially long bout of unemployment by plugging up our nonessential spending, creating an ”unemployment budget” based on my income, and socking away any money we saved into a savings account. But when it comes to our wedding fund, well, our pockets are feeling a bit on the light side.

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My grandmother always told me not to talk about money, politics or religion in polite society. But if you consider that an antiquated sentiment, or don’t consider yourself polite society, then come on in to the discussion.

We started with a moderate budget for this ol’ weddin’ of ours – enough for a few splurges, but still modest enough for the need to be budget-savvy. Mama & Step-Husky graciously offered us some cash, to be used for the wedding, honeymoon, or down-payment on a house. Seeing as we’d already purchased a house, and we were including the honeymoon in our wedding budget, that money was deposited directly into our wedding account. Then Daddy Husky stepped up and offered to match that amount, so then our wedding account balance was half full. I prepared a plan for us to save up the rest by September 2010 – the month before our big day.

During our last trip to visit the Husky-in-laws, they generously offered to contribute to the total as well. We had managed to fill our self-funded portion of the amount early, and our account was 25% over-funded. Mr. Husky and I agreed that, despite the unexpected growth of our wedding fund, we should still keep the expenses at our originally agreed upon budget. So we set the extra money aside, and I went about my merry way planning how to use each and every penny of that amount.

And then we got the news that when Husky’s contract expired, there would not be another one for him to work. The project he had been working on was complete, and the funding wasn’t there to start a new one. Bummer.

We decided to keep our wedding spending to the parentally-funded amount, and add the rest to our unemployment savings account. To do this, we needed to find a way to shave 25% off of our total wedding budget. Here are just a few of our strategies:

The Honeymoon. I had almost 20% of our total budget set aside for our honeymoon. I had visions of sipping limoncello from our terrace overlooking the ocean as the sun lazily sank into the sea of the Amalfi Coast. For the last 3 months, Italian for Dummies has been on repeat in my car stereo. But as a top-ticket item, it was one of the first to get cut. I will confess to being very disappointed…

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Photography. By the time we found out Husky’s contract would be ending, we had already put down our deposit on the photographer. Fortunately when we were interviewing and evaluating photographers, we had the foresight to require all images in digital format, and full printing rights to those images. Our photography budget had included some extra cash for ordering prints, and creating a lovely Blurb album. Now we’ve decided to hold off on both of those until we’ve returned to our double-income life.

(why, yes, I have swooned over Mrs. Cupcake’s Creation)

Leveraging. I know this is only sort of like the actual leveraging, but I haven’t come up with a better word. Since we’re purchasing a lot of the items needed for the wedding, instead of renting, we have plans to sell some of those items. After all, how often does one entertain 125 guests? So I’ve created a spreadsheet with very conservative estimates of the expected returns from sales of these items. We are essentially borrowing from ourselves, but only by as much as we expect to make from post-wedding sales—so our final expenditures will stay within the budget.

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Those are just a few of the ways we’re adjusting to the new budget. Has your wedding budget changed drastically since it was first drawn out? What changes did you have to make?