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O/T: Should we push back our wedding date?

SteppingUp's picture

Submitted by SteppingUp on Thu, 10/07/2010 - 11:52am

We are considering pushing back our wedding date, because of money issues. It is scheduled for September 2011. Our baby is due March 2011, so 6 months before that. Right now we are pretty much living paycheck to paycheck, although I've been building up my savings for when the baby comes and should have atleast $1500 by March.

First, I want to say that I know a lot of you will say we should get married at the courthouse and not do anything big. I am aware that many of you will give me some backlash for trying to hold on to the picture of our wedding day that we have. However, both me, my fiance, and our families really want to get everyone together for the "big reception". We have mostly out of town families and it would be one of our only opportunities to get everyone here to visit and celebrate. We are very thrifty in a lot of areas so it won't be a wildly extravagant wedding by ANY means...it's just going to be large, which ends up costing money.

Our parents are helping us with the wedding, but even with their help I am estimating that we will be paying about $2-3,000 out of our own pockets. The baby is due in March and I'm not able to get any sort of paid time off during my maternity leave...so depending on how long I take off of work, it's all completely with no money coming in from my side and using the savings I'm building now.

The two options we are weighing:
1) Push the wedding back to summer 2012, which will give us about 6 more months to save. We are hoping I will be getting a teaching job next fall (which will mean I will get paid almost double what I am making right now) and we'd have no problem with the 2012 date. If I don't get a teaching job, the 6 months extra won't help that much anyway and we'd end up putting some of the costs on credit or cutting the wedding down drastically in size.
2) Keep the wedding date, and borrow the extra money we need from a family member (my sister) to pay back. This might sound bad, but we figure we can use some of the money we get from the wedding to pay her back right away.

Thoughts?

Comments

happymostly's picture

Submitted by happymostly on Thu, 10/07/2010 - 12:37pm

my dh and I just got married at the courthouse in May. we both had wanted to have family and stuff around, but money was tight for both of us at the time, so we just went ahead and got married at the courthouse. Only 75 bucks all together. We ARE planning on having a reception type deal for our year anniversary this coming May for family and we are going to have a meal catered. My cousin recently got married in Mexico, it was just him and his wife who were there and when they came back they had a huge reception for all the family and they had a video of their wedding, so it was like we were there. It turned out pretty nice! They also had a slide show of pictures of them when they were younger. Its whatever you guys want to do. You CAN plan a wedding with a limited amount of money, you might try googling it by typing in whatever you budget is, say "how to plan a wedding on a 2,000 dollar budget" you should get some ideas, that's what I did, even though we didnt end up going that route.

Rainbow.Bright's picture

Submitted by Rainbow.Bright on Thu, 10/07/2010 - 7:09pm

You can have a wedding for a couple thousand dollars. Take what both of your families are giving you and budget for that for the wedding. The catering and location are the 2 most expensive things to budget. If you find a way to get around those two things for cheaper, you can still have a nice wedding.

The only problem with putting things off, is babies are very expensive. You are going to need every cent when she comes and I honestly don't think your dream wedding would come to fruition in the first few years of the baby's life.

I can't remember where I heard this from, but there was an advice columnist who asked her reader, who wanted to borrow money for her wedding, what kind of foundation that was setting for the marriage and if that's how she wanted to start their life together...thousands in debt. That's something you will have to decide on!