Wedding and Saving Money

Lately Mark and I have been talking seriously about buying a house. This is no small step especially for a non-saver such as myself! It also brings back memories of the nightmarish 6 months leading up to our wedding.

Given that it was our 4^th wedding anniversary last week it seems timely to blog about this.

When Mark proposed he never intended for us to have a long engagement. His reasoning was that if you propose; why wait for years to get married. I think I could have coped with a year between, however due to a peculiar set of circumstances we set the date slightly less than 6 months from our engagement. We also had to go to Melbourne for Mark’s sister’s wedding as well.

Can I just say that this was possibly THE MOST STRESSFUL 6 months of my entire life! Truly, I am surprised that I did not lose weight from the sheer stress of saving like crazy people. There were weeks when I did not think that we could feed ourselves and our cats. Two days before our wedding we had $20 in the bank. It was utterly ridiculous.

I remember car rides home when I just cried the entire way. One huge issue for me was accommodation. My birth family owns holiday accommodation and this was the venue for our wedding; trying to fit everyone into the accommodation available was a nightmare. Seriously, I should have just said “there is limited accommodation and this will be reserved for older friends and family and other people can stay here, here and here”.

The worst thing is, is that now I have so much more experience with weddings and the planning that goes into them I could easily organise our wedding within 6 months and probably save so much money and stress. I am sure that my sisters’ learnt from my mistakes. Also, everyone else had fairy lights and the bubble machine at their weddings!

I wish I had delegated a bit more leading up to our day, but all the lists were in my head instead of on paper.

I should have used an iPod playlist instead of a DJ.

I should not have spent $720 on a cake!

Two of my bridesmaid’s staged an intervention when I had not bought a dress with just 3 months to go. Suffice to say I had actually ordered it about 2 days before the intervention.

However, thanks to our friends and family we had the most amazing wedding day. It started to drizzle in the morning and I just lay in bed and smiled. I always thought that rain on my wedding day would be my undoing, but it was not. In the middle of the ceremony the sun shone through the clouds creating beautiful rays of light.

We also came out the other side of our day with NO DEBT; which was a huge relief. This was testament to our savings and also the help of family.

So I figure if we can get through 6 months of pain then we can definitely save for a house.

The best thing is that we finally get to have our honeymoon 4 years after our wedding. I am not postponing it for anyone. We are going to the beautiful Cook Islands for an amazing break. We cannot wait!