Last night the beau and I tallied up all the wedding quotes and estimates and were subsequently rewarded with our first “oh shit” budget moment. We came up with the kind of number that makes you go all BLUH?! and want to immediately lie down on the floor. The beau wondered what we should do about this number. “Cry,” I suggested, but he didn’t seem to think this was a particularly practical or useful activity. So. Hard decisions time it is.
We had been toying around with doing an Asian fusion-style menu for our wedding, but now that’s just sort of like pffft. And I mean, is putting on a pre-wedding rehearsal barbecue for our friends and family really necessary? And why should I worry about buying an expensive dress when I can wear a burlap sack practically for free?
Ha ha, I am just kidding about that last part. Sort of. And you can rest assured that I am not considering selling a kidney to help pay for the wedding. That’s utter nonsense. I need that kidney for the wedding night Drinkfest very mature social gathering in which we will all wear turtlenecks and discuss Russian literature.
Fun times.
I kind of hate this part of the planning. I am good with my own budget. So good. I balance it. All. The. Time. I know exactly how much of my cash is flowing, and where it’s flowing to (I am not looking at you anymore, Modcloth). But this wedding is the first shared budget between the beau and I. And to be brutally honest, the beau is shoveling a lot more money into it than I am. My job pays less and most of my scrilla still goes to student loans. I feel guilty about entering into our marriage on uneven footing.
Some stubborn part of me is just plain embarrassed that our wedding contributions aren’t equal. Even though I know there is nothing truly egalitarian about relationships, ever. Somebody is always paying more or putting in more effort or investing more time. Yet I still feel like I don’t own our wedding budget, not like I own my own. In my mind, that money is mostly his.
No, this is our money, he tells me sincerely. Part of me, whenever I hear that, wants to make some juvenile declaration like well then I am taking “our” money and going to Brazil for a month, smell you later! But I don’t. This is a good first lesson in thinking beyond myself and my own means. A good exercise in adjusting to this new concept of joint finances.
HEEEEEE I said “joint.” Oh lawd, maybe I am not quite cut out for adulthood just yet.*
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* Further evidence to support this: I make “your mom” jokes all the time and none of my dishes match. I think this is a prerequisite for Adulthood 201?
I’m with you 100% on that unequal financial contribution guilt. I’m the po broke one in my relationship so it makes me feel a little scrubby. But then I try to think about it logically.
Dave:
1. Six years older than I am
2. He’s a lawyer/financial planner
So he makes more than TWICE what I make and it would follow that our contributions to our lifestyle are “relative”, which IS equal – but as a percentage of each of our incomes, not an exact dollar amount. That’s fair, right? And we have a joint checking account to which we contribute an equal dollar amount for lots of things like going to BJs or Home Depot. Sometimes I even feel a little annoyed that here I am paying for exactly half of a new bathroom fan/light thing. That 50 bucks means more to me, and MY budget, than it does him and HIS budget.
I think the real problem is my (and your?!) inability to think of money as “ours”. I still feel like it’s mine, his, and then this pot that we both contribute to so we can do fun stuff and not worry about squaring up all the time. Of all the various facets of marriage we’re about to face together, money is by far my biggest stressor/fear.
Lyn – do you think that’s part of your dilemma? That you are struggling to feel like it’s “our” money…b/c it somehow makes you feel like some kind of scrubby mooch to pool it all, when you are working your ass off and still only able to contribute much less than he?
Yeah, I would agree with that assessment. It’s weird, you know? “Mine” and “his” becoming “ours.” It’s a mental process we all have to sort through. Add to the fact that talking about money is fraught with status issues, and we all have our work cut out for us.
obviously i don’t have quite the same perspective you do, since i am sans mate, but i do kind of know what you mean. i think a lot of it comes from the way we are, the way we were raised. i remember having a conversation with my mom once when i was in college where she told me that even if she ever did get married again, she didn’t really want to have a joint checking account.* she’d become far too accustomed to being the master of her own damn finances, thank you very much.
this isn’t the fifties. we’re not expected to expect our spouses to support us. hell, we don’t want our spouses to support us. we’re rather accustomed to being independent, being on our own, and managing our own lives, including our own financial situation. it’s a prime marker of adulthood, to my way of thinking. and i think it’s hard to learn to give up a little bit of that control and make decisions jointly, for one, but i also think it can seem like moving backwards – toward dependency – when you feel that you’re not contributing “equally.” it starts to seem like charity.
so i understand that adjusting to “ours” is difficult, but i think you also realize that this isn’t charity or a move towards dependency. how much money you put into your living situation (or your wedding) isn’t an arbiter of either your relationship or your status as an adult. this is a life that you are building together, and sometimes one or the other of you might contribute more, but overall you contribute equally in any number of ways.
i hope this all made sense – it feels like it ended up more muddled than it sounded in my head.
*for the record, i have no idea whether she is still maintaining this position, now that she actually has remarried.
The money thing is tricky. We do the mine, his and our bank accounts – where each of us puts a designated amount into the joint account each month. We’ve been doing this for years but now that the wedding is approaching and we’re each paying for whatever we can afford (me making a bit more and thus contributing a bit more), I have to keep reminding myself that it really is OUR money. It’s a tricky thing when you’re trained to be protective and not think of money this way.
Wedding budgets are awful to look at though aren’t they? I have a google doc where I track them and the original number just keeps creeping up with a little addition here and a little addition there… all these seemingly insignificant numbers that all add up to A LOT! We’re not doing anything extravagant so I don’t see what we could cut. And there is probably a hundred other little expenses I have yet to think of…
We’re having a hard time cutting too. It’s like, OK, we can shave a few hundred dollars here, a few dozen dollars there… but we can’t actually get real budget results unless we scrap some things entirely. So, awesome sauce. I suppose this is positive in that we get a chance to be grownups and work towards something big and meaningful together… as you pointed out, it’s just hard changing how you think about money.
wait — is it not ok to be pushing 29 and making your mom jokes? eff. (although in all honesty, i’ve cut back significantly since going to college and realizing that suddenly i didn’t know anything about my new friends’ moms, including, ahem, whether they were alive, and that your mom jokes were suddenly treacherous territory. now most yms languish in the theater of my head.)
what was the point again? oh yeah, my boy and i make similar money (for now–though that will change, and i’ll need to learn to deal) so decided to make equal contributions to the wedding budget. so slightly different situation, but i’m actually really digging getting used to thinking of the money as “ours” to budget according to our shared/compromised priorities. i think it’s good for me, since i’m a frugal bitch and also not very good about sharing. and it definitely helps prevent me from going hog-wild on an expensive dress or other frippery that would mostly be for ME, because i’m able to check myself with reference to our shared budget and priorities, which focus more on booze and food than couture attire or fancy decor/invites/etc. so anyhow, good luck!
I secretly hope to be making “your mom” jokes until the day I die (if you want to get meta, try inflicting a “your mom” joke on your own mother, without thinking, and watch the hilarz confusion ensue), but I agree it can be, um, socially awkward sometimes.
Also: I am with you on frontloading the food and booze in the budget.
My fiance makes more money than I do, and it has not been as easy to deal with as I thought it would be, so I definitely know how you feel! All I can say is, you love each other and in the words of Tim Gunn, you make it work!
oh man I’m screwed then if you need all your dishes to match! haha
Apparently your furniture too!! Crazy, right?
The “budget gasp” has sounded out many times throughout our household…generally synonymous with the “guest list gasp.”
I definitely hear where this post is coming from because it’s the flip side for us- I’m currently upholding our wedding budget by pouring every extra cent from paychecks into whatever stupid sh*t we need that week for Save the Dates or decor or whatever. It’s because R and I work freelance and the work was swinging my way. But now it’s starting to swing back to his and I know that he’ll pour a good amount into the budget when he can. Joint finances is a sticky thing, I’ve found, just from living together and evening out the bills, and I definitely don’t look forward to bringing everything together after the wedding. From what I hear, it’s both awesome and awful all at the same time. Yeesh.
Also, “your mom” jokes are to you what “your face” jokes are to me and I’ve got plastic Disney’s Hercules dishes in the cabinet next to my Marvin the Martain dish, Superman and Wonderwoman, and the bargain set of “china” I got for $10 at Target. Soooo, yeah.
If you find the tree, can you let me know where it is too? We’ve not looked at budgets too much yet – but we’ve had quotes in and been left thinking ‘what? we have to pay for chairs to be at the venue?’ Ok, so we’re new to all this and maybe that’s the done thing – but if we were hiring for a corporate do I’m thinking chairs would be included in the venue hire! (Sorry that rant came out of nowhere there!!)
Our situation is a flipped since I make more money than he does. The boy’s trying to get two businesses off the ground which at times is awesome (free booze/entertainment at the wedding) and other times not (figuring out how to pay for all the other shit). We combined our finances almost two years ago, when he still had a steady paycheck and we basically made the same amount but now that things are skewed I think it’s harder for him to think of the money as ours. I keep reminding him that I’ve got two years on him and it will even out again.
As for wedding budget meltdown. Been there. Sucks, right? Sadly it looks like what we’ll be cutting is our original grand honeymoon plans. Though the boy thinks we should just give all the guests a $5 gift certificate to the KFC located across the street from our venue.
Tempting.
3 words: Joint bank account. Now some more, proportional contribution. Tally your joint expenses (including any special ones like ‘vacation’ or ‘wedding’) and contribute proportionate to your incomes. Then pay everything joint out of that account. That way what’s “ours” is “ours” and even though one of you makes more, no one has to feel guilty about what they keep for themselves.
We’ve done it for almost 3 years now and it really helped. Like, when I was making less than half as much as him. Now we’re on almost equal footing and that’s fine too. But it’s felt the same the whole time. Good stuff seriously.
Oh, and obviously, keep your own personal accounts including your own personal savings. When you want to get real fancy get a joint savings. that will be a total of 6 bank accounts but it’s super sweet.