Reeling It In

We are 6 months out from our wedding (HOLY...!!!) and I am at a turning point.

Although our deposits are all in, that only speaks for less than 10% of our overall budget… the time to really start spending is upon us and the shit is hitting the fan. Okay… that sounded negative… what I really mean is that it’s all becoming very real. You can make all the budgets you want, for all the little decorations and useless knick knacks that you think you need for your wedding but when you really start opening your wallet, I guarantee you, you will rethink everything! I thanked Pinterest in my last post, but in this one I will criticize it a bit.

Pinterest has made it so that I want to do ALL of those cute DIY ideas no matter how unnecessary they are or how much they don’t have anything to do with my theme or motif. Yesterday I went through my “LIST” (the list of everything I wanted for my wedding, down to every teeny tiny detail) and I wacked off half of the stuff. Up until then, I had been crossing stuff off if I thought it might not work out (then maybe I could revisit it later)… but yesterday, I straight up deleted stuff. (For me, this is a huge deal; I’m a hoarder… even of electronic files)

Like I said, one reason I did this is because some of my ideas just weren’t meshing, it was like 5 different wedding being squashed into one. Since I’ve started planning, my overall anticipated feeling/theme has changed as well. But the main reason was a talk I had with my fiancé. Like the beer drinking, fly fishing, car show watching man that he is, he thinks I am being ridiculously obsessive about our wedding. He didn’t say those exact words (and what else can I except from a dude) but it really made me see a new perspective. He thinks I am planning “unnecessary” things and mostly, that I am overspending. A guys perspective is, “there are so many other things I would rather spend money on” and my perspective is, “this better be my only wedding and I deserve it to be the wedding of my dreams”. I think that where I can level with him is: “we can throw a beautiful, fun wedding but not have to but every last penny into savings in order to afford it”. Of course, in order to get there, I’m going to make a few cuts.

Maybe I don’t need paper lanterns, mason jar lanterns, arcade garlands and twinkle lights… maybe I only need one (or two?) of those. Sometimes I forget that we are lucky enough to have an insanely pretty venue that doesn’t need much dressing up!

So as I continue planning and purchasing, I am trying super hard to keep in mind that a wedding doesn’t have to eat up savings (or what could be savings). So far, I have done a really good job of staying under our budget and I plan on not straying from that path!