Saving Money When Planning Your Wedding

Posted By Paul




I noticed that the bridal shows are revving up, which made me think back to when my wife and I were planning our wedding. We wanted to pay for our wedding ourselves (when we got married we were both "grown ups" with jobs and homes so it seemed silly to expect our families to chip in), and paying for everything ourselves really gave us total control over what our wedding ended up being.

Planning a wedding is a great test of a relationship and I think in some ways the way you plan your wedding can set the financial attitude for your whole marriage. Here are some tips that came from my wife and my experience of planning a wedding:

Focus On Good Enough - You hear the phrase "The Perfect Wedding" all over the place, especially once you dive into the world of planning your wedding. One thing my wife and I did on the first day of planning our wedding was agreeing that we were never going to worry about making things perfect, we were going to focus on making things good enough. Not to say that we wanted things to be ugly, messy or chintzy, but the idea was that we weren't going to drive ourselves crazy chasing some arbitrary ideal of the perfect wedding.

Identify Your Priorities - My wife and I sat down and discussed what was important to us in our wedding. For example, my wife has a large family and they all live nearby, and her family is really important to her. Even though one of the easiest ways to make a wedding cheaper is to make the guest list shorter, my wife's priority was to be able to invite her extended family. We also both wanted to have good photographs of our wedding, so we made paying for a photographer a priority. Once we agreed on our priorities we knew that we needed to save money in other places to accommodate what was important to us. It made it much easier to cut back on things when we could keep our eyes on the prize of what was important to us.

Set Your Budget From The Start - My wife and I took a look at our finances and decided what we could afford for our wedding. We took that amount of money and put it into an account, and ALL money for the wedding came out of that account. Two very important things came out of this decision. First we only spent money that we had (I cringe when I hear about people who start off their lives together with a big credit card debt thanks to wedding spending gone out of control). Second, being able to tell at any moment how much was in the wedding fund made it easy to stick to our budget.

Don't Buy Into The Hype - The wedding industry tries to convince you that your wedding is the most important day of your life and that your wedding day will be ruined if you don't have ice sculptures and a custom tailored tux. Don't believe it.

Remember What's Important - My wife and I went to a quinceanera party that really brought the whole thing home for me. The party was held in a school gym, where tables had been set up. The food was simple, delicious, and plentiful, served on paper plates with family and friends serving as "waiters". For drinks paper cups and two liter bottles were handed out. The venue was not opulent but all friends and family were welcome. The food was not fancy, but it was delicious and served in a way where you felt like you were part of a family dinner. There was no DJ or hired MC, instead there were sincere speeches of welcome and affection from the family. I have never been to a better example of how you can throw a big party on a reasonable budget by focusing on what's important, and not getting distracted by things that don't matter.

Do It Yourself - My wife and I saved a lot of money by making the centerpieces ourselves, doing our own flower arrangements, making our own programs, and all kinds of things that you can do yourself if you just take the time to do it. Not only did we save money by doing all of these things ourselves but my wife and I really enjoyed having a wedding where so many aspects of the wedding were literally made by her and I.

There are hundreds of articles out there with tips for saving money on your wedding, but I hope that my suggestions provide a way to come at the daunting task of planning a wedding with the ideas and attitude to keep you on budget.

Wedding Planning, Buying An Engagement Ring

Posted By Paul

As we enter into a popular time for couples to get engaged and start planning their wedding, I wanted to take a moment to write about buying an engagement ring. Why? Because if you do a google search on buying a diamond, you come up with some amazing results.

For example, one diamond buying guide that I found on the internet includes phrases like:

"Buying a diamond means investing in a piece of forever."

and

"You can rest assured that the diamond you buy will be a sound financial investment."


It was these sorts of phrases along with phrases that I heard at jewelry stores while looking that made me want to write this article. Phrases like: "This is one of the most important purchases you'll ever make." and "This ring is a symbol of your love, so you need to make sure to get something of the highest quality." make me cringe, since I suspect the salesperson wouldn't use these phrases if they didn't work.

Just today on the radio the DJ was talking about buying a diamond ring and in her overview she said (quoting from memory here):

A two-carat diamond is now the standard, and when you figure that you may have your wedding ring for your whole life, it's a good investment.

-and-

There have been a lot of yellow diamonds on the market currently, being presented as a cool style, but THESE ARE NOT WHAT WE WANT LADIES.

Why does this bug me so much? The diamond marketing machine in particular and the diamond industry in general is one of the most terrible industries in so many ways (just google 'blood diamond' or 'conflict diamond' to learn some of the darker aspects of the industry). But I wanted to really focus on the marketing machine that exists around diamonds.

First of all, just to make it clear that I'm not trying to preach, when I proposed to my (now) wife I had a diamond ring. Why? Because I knew that's what my wife really wanted. This is a choice that I made (and a choice that she made), and a choice that you should make but I wanted to offer a few tips from my experience:

1) Remember, a diamond is NOT mandatory - I have several friends who chose to get sapphires, emeralds, or some other stone, not to mention friends who prefer a simple wedding band. I applaud these people who decided to forego convention and focus on what THEY wanted and not what society told them they needed.

2) If you do decide that you want to get a diamond, try to focus on how the diamond appears to the naked eye. There are all the guides out there that talk about the "4 C's" of diamonds, and often when you go to a diamond store they will be more than happy to have you examine a diamond using a magnifying glass. Try to remember that the whole point of buying a diamond engagement ring is to have it end up in a setting and on your wife's finger where it will pretty much sit all the time. One of the most common things I saw in stores that sold loose diamonds was their tendency to show you a diamond on a stark white sheet of paper (accentuating any color deviation) and offering you a magnifying glass (so you can pick out any flaw that the stone might have). Think about every time you've admired a friend or relative's wedding ring. How often did you ask the woman to take off the ring so that you could look at it with a magnifying glass?

3) I recommend taking the time to figure out what's important to you (by 'you' I ideally mean the bride and the groom since I consider a ring to be a big purchase so why not start off healthy marriage habits and discuss the purchase together). Just like any other purchase, decide what "features" are ones that you are willing to pay for. For example, maybe you want a really big diamond and are willing to live with it being a little yellow-ish, or maybe you are fine with a smaller stone but really want it to have a clear color. If you want the ring selection to be a surprise (I actually think ring shopping together is fun), then doing a little investigation (ask questions about what's important to the bride while window shopping at a jewelry store at the mall).

4) Don't think of a diamond as an investment. You hear this one a lot from salespeople. Even if you buy the idea that a diamond is a sound financial investment (and I REALLY don't), the idea of buying a wedding ring is that you'll have it for the rest of your life, so why consider something an investment if you're never going to sell it? (If there was a savings account that let you deposit money, but never let you withdraw it, would you consider that a good investment?).

5) I know several people who had a diamond that was in the family that they reused it in some way (for example using the stone in a new setting). The end result was a ring that was cheaper AND had a family history. A very cool option if it's available.

6) If possible find someone you trust when buying your ring. If you can find a trusted friend or a family member who is part of the jewelry industry then that's a huge bonus. It's not about finding someone who will give you a great deal, it's just about finding someone who will give you a fair deal and won't try to rob you blind.

7) I really would suggest that you not finance the ring. The ring is the first purchase in your journey towards married life, why make that first step purchasing something beyond your means that puts you in debt? If funds are low, that's nothing to be ashamed off, you can buy a smaller ring with a plan to upgrade it at your five year anniversary, or buy a CZ ring and replace the stone when you can afford it.

Most of all try to keep in mind that in many ways buying a diamond is a really an absurd purchase that our society tells you you need to make. In my opinion the sole purpose of a diamond on a ring is to look pretty to the naked eye. Contrast that with a cubic zirconia which looks just as pretty as a diamond (I don't know of anyone who can tell the difference with their naked eye). So why are you buying the diamond? It's essentially this strange sense of needing a real diamond as opposed to a fake one, but why? What difference does it really make? If you wanted to buy a new car for $50,000 but there was a different model that was the same in EVERY way except some of the parts could be shown to be different (not better, just different) when seen under a microscope, and the other car cost $500 which one would you buy?

Again, I'm not saying that you shouldn't buy a diamond ring, but just keep the absurdity of the whole industry in mind when you go shopping and make sure you don't get too sucked in by all of the hype out there.

I did find one reasonable diamond buying guide here at wedfrugal.com that had a lot of common sense advice:


http://www.wedfrugal.com/files/buyingdiamonds.html


P.S.


In the last few years my wife has totally gotten into CZ jewelry. One year as a gift we went to the store and she got to pick out a CZ tennis bracelet (diamond versions cost well into the $2000+ range). She has discovered it's just as pretty, it was SOOO much cheaper, and another added bonus is that she doesn't have to be all paranoid about losing it when she wears it out.