How Did We Get Married On The Cheap(ish)?

As I've mentioned, we came in under budget on the wedding. Huzzah!

Astute readers will infer that the marriage did in fact occur. It was awesome, fun, joyful, serene, and several other positive adjectives. I now know who gets all my stuff if I die. Romance in action, folks.

But back to the juicy part: how did we come in under budget? And (what you may actually be wondering), how could someone else, perhaps you, come in under budget on their wedding?

The glib answer is to pick a large number you know you can beat. Instant warm fuzzies.

The less glib answer is that we made a number of unconventional choices that helped us keep our numbers low, while still providing a kick ass time (and open bar) for our nearest and dearest.

1) Set a total budget figure. In order to come in under budget, you need to have a budget. Figure out how much you can, or want to, spend and work backwards from there. We set our number based on how much we could save between getting engaged and the wedding itself while still meeting our other goals. We decided we could save $12k (some of this was converted from previous savings, some was savings between engagement and wedding), but the idea of spending that amount on one day made us feel queasy. On principle, we didn't want to spend twelve grand on a wedding. So we pegged our line item budget to a lower number ($10k, since we're all about oversharing on this blog) with the idea that we had a safety net if, for example, the open bar we really wanted to provide got out of control. We came in just under our line item budget.

2) Create a line-item budget.To figure out our line item budget, my first step was the budget calculator at the knot.com. You have to register to use the calculator, but I found it worth it. Registration is free. A word of caution, don't spend spend a lot of time on the rest of the site, and avoid at all costs the message board, unless you feel like curdling your soul. The nice thing about this calculator is once you put in your overall budget it will automatically apportion that amount among lots of different categories based, I suppose, on "what most people do" and thus to some extent on what is realistic. From there you can delete line items you don't want, can add line items for things not in the baseline, or tweak the percentage of your budget going to each line item. So you don't start from ground zero having to make shit up on your own, but it's extremely easy to personalize your budget.

In our experience, some of the biggest savings came when we deleted line items we didn't want or need. Looking back at our knot.com protobudget, we axed: headpiece/veil, ceremony accessories (I don't even know what that is!), flowers of any sort (we married during winter, nothing is growing here), ceremony musicians, cocktail hour musicians, reception music (all music was DJed by an ipod and our lovingly crafted playlists), videographer, additional prints and videos, limo/car rental, attendant gifts (no attendants), parent gifts (we paid for the wedding ourselves, that was our gift to them), favors, hotel room (a friend pulled some strings and put us up somewhere swanky as his gift to us, otherwise we would have slept at home and had our first licit sex in the bed in which we'd had all that illicit sex), wedding coordinator, guest shuttle/parking. That got us our protobuget. Your list of stuff to chuck will be different, but I encourage you to chuck liberally. Liberal chucking is key. The stuff you chuck is not really that important in the end, I promise. We tweaked from there based on what was more or less important to us, which is how we arrived at our actual line item budget.

3) Don't pay your officiant. There are a number of states that allow what's called self-uniting, which means the parties marry themselves and don't need an officiant at all. Or, if you are getting married in a state that allows it, you can have a friend or family member ordained from someplace like the Universal Life Church. There's a small fee for the ordination, but after that you're home free. Or you could find someone who is already empowered to perform marriages and who is willing to help you out. I have a friend who is a judge and loves performing marriages but who is rarely asked. He offered to give me a 100% discount if we let him perform our ceremony because he likes doing weddings so much.

4) Splurge on stuff only if you'll use again. What, pray tell, is that? That will differ by person, too, but I will go out on a limb and say that if you're only going to use something for one day out of your life, you shouldn't break the bank on it, whereas if you honestly expect to use it into the future maybe it's worth spending a little because your cost per use will plummet. And remember, splurge is a relative term. The stuff we bought ostensibly for the wedding but that is in actuality completely reusable--some of it's already been reused, actually-is: my awesome designer cocktail dress and my fabulous vintage gown; Shiner's dashing suit, shoes, and cufflinks; my wedding day makeup (I did my own, I looked like myself); my lingere, a Bose sound dock for the ipod-provided music; a 12-inch vintage glass cake stand; our paper goods (blank letterhead we used for our invitations, wedding thank yous, normal thank yous, and regular letters and cards, and a decorative marriage certificate that is traditionaly hung in a place of honor in the couple's home). If next year we figured out a cost-per-use for each of these items, I bet the cost of our wedding would be more than $1,000 lower than it was. Apart from the food and drink everything else was borrowed, cannibalized from stuff we already owned, crafted from stuff we already had, bought on big huge discount sale, or found at a thrift store. Even our rings were done on the cheap. Ah, romance. The only thing that can't be used again and was not gotten on the cheap was my hairdo. The exception that proves the rule.

5) Have your reception at a restaurant, bar, or club. You won't have to pay for rentals, and you might not even have to pay to rent the space. Some of the places we first looked at were $4000 just to rent the space, which is more than we paid for food, drinks, and space at our restaurant venue. You'll get good food, not the stuff people only eat because they're stuck with a venue's contractually required caterer, and professional waitstaff that does this as a regular gig not just a couple hours once a week, like most of my friends who have done event catering as an odd job.

Those are my biggest tips, apart from the ones you've probably already heard--offseason, afternoon instead of evening, no alcohol, small guest list, buffet food or passed nosh rather than plated meals, etc. But everyone makes compromises. The things I listed above meant that we could have an open bar and host 60 people, which are not the skinflintiest choices we could have made. You don't have to scrimp deprive yourself on absolutely everything if you decide not to worry yourself or your wallet with stuff that you come to realize doesn't matter to you. Honestly, it's easy for me to see where we could have made different choices and spent more money but I wouldn't have changed anything about our wedding even if I had a printing press kicking out hundred dollar bills in the basement.

Is This A Good Time To Talk About The Unusual Things We've Done For Money?

Maybe you're looking for a job to help you stretch a little farther every month. Maybe you just have an adventurous spirit. On Monday, Budgets Are Sexy posted a roundup of the most offbeat jobs various bloggers have had over the years: Bone counter, cod de-tonguer, calf catcher, Chuck E. Cheeze furry... There are some winners in there if you are looking for job hunting inspiration.

My worst offbeat job was as a telemarketer for death and dismemberment insurance. What a downer. We were encouraged to play on the fears of the retirees who were the bulk of our contacts, so many of whom were lonely and just wanted someone to talk to. Pretty despicable. There was a three-month probation period during which your realization numbers didn't matter. My numbers always sucked, I just couldn't upsell for the life of me. I quit before the end of the probation period, but if I hadn't I surely would have been fired for underperformance. It paid something like $7 an hour, with the possibility of a commission I obviously never got.

My best offbeat job was as a nude model for various art schools. I always worked through schools or museums because they do the tax stuff right, and because working in their buildings, with onsite security personnel and a proper HR department, made me feel relatively safe. It paid $12 an hour, which was great for a job a college student could do while hungover. The only job requirement is that you be able to stay extremely still in a variety of positions for somewhere between 90 seconds to 2 hours. A lot of my friends were shocked that I was comfortable doing it, but honestly the only real drawback was that you have to have a lot of self confidence or else if you caught glimpses of some students' drawings of your body, you could easily come to believe that you were somewhere between extremely unattractive to grossly misshapen, with knees that bend the wrong way or ears that look like conch shells. Just because someone enrolled in art school does not mean she excels at figure drawing or portraiture.

A friend of mine was a census recounter, making one last swipe through town to make sure every resident was counted. He was assigned the area of town in which, due to regsitration and minimum distance requirements, all the registered sex offendered lived.

2009 Financial Goals

It's taken a while to pull this together. Just as I suspected, whenever I thought we were almost there we'd get another piece of information that would throw things off kilter. Nothing bad--someone would give us money as a wedding gift for example, or we came in under budget on the wedding (blessed occurrance, that). But we're more or less final on this batch. Since we're deliberately taking the financial integration process slowly, we're breaking our goals down individually based on what's being funded out of whose paycheck, with the understanding that neither of us could achieve our goals without the assistance and support of the other.

Shiner's 2009 Goals
1) Max out 401(k). This is about a third of his salary, but we decided to be drastic about it because he has very little in retirement savings, and because the market is crap so this is as good a time as any to buy and hold index funds.
2) $5000 into a Roth IRA. He doesn't have one yet. The stretch goal is that he'll stash away more than the $5000 contribution limit by opening a 2008 Roth within the next couple of months and then funding a 2009 Roth on top of that.
3) Get his last remaining credit card down to $2750, from about $6000 now. The stretch goal is to pay it off completely. We decided he should prioritize retirement contributions over paying down his credit card debt because the debt is allegedly 0% for life. If Discover jerks him around and jacks up the rate, we'll re-prioritize but for now, it's less pressing than retirement.

My 2009 Goals
1) Max out my 401(k) by the end of July. Sometime this summer I'll be leaving my job for one with no 401(k), so I'm foreshortening my contributions. It'll be the last time I can contribute until late 2011, and I may never come back to such a high paying job as I have now.
2) Max out a Roth IRA.
3) Pay off the home equity loan. I'm in the home stretch--$5500 to go.
4) Save two months living expenses in a joint savings account. We're treating this as completely separate from the savings I built up before we were married.
5) Save $1500 for home maintenance. Though after a busted furnace, water heater, and utility sink in the last two years I'm not quite sure what else could break apart from what's covered by insurance. But I don't care to tempt fate.

Just A Reminder

I enforce a no asshole policy in the comment section. If you would like to be an asshole on a keyboard, you will need to type elsewhere.

Will Affordable Birth Control Be Part Of The Next Bailout Bill?

Nancy Pelosi has proposed including birth control funding in the $85bn bailout-sub-two package that is currently wending its way through the legislative process; the every sperm is sacred crowd wrings their hands.

Most of the coverage on this has painted this as a lunatic partisan suggestion. But providing access to affordable birth control for those women who want it is not some wacky earmark, it's a legitimate component of houshold economic security. We've seen time and time again that women who cannot control their own fertility are economically vulnerable, and that poverty and forced pregnancy (which is, after all, what limiting access to birth control and abortion aims to bring about) go hand in hand.

In a country with a broken health care system, where the costs of labor and delivery are no walk in the park, just the having of a kid can break a family's finances. And that's leaving completely aside the costs of raising a kid, the the economic impact of unpaid post-partum leave or the physiological impact of not taking leave because you can't afford to, the cost of day care or of cutting back on work hours because you can't afford daycare... And that's just in the first couple of months of parenthood.

Let's stop pretending that an unexpected pregnancy = unmitigated joy, and let's stop vilifying women who acknowledge that having a child, if you're not digging the idea of being a parent and are not relatively solvent to begin with, can be scary or even downright dangerous. The last thing a family on the brink needs is another mouth they know they're not prepared to feed, and people who refuse to admit that are frankly too myopic to listen to.

There are a lot of crap suggestions on the table right now as far as what this new bailout bill will fund. Subsidized birth control for women who want it is not one of those crap suggestions. If the federal government is going to continue to pretend that it is concerned with stabilizing US households with this bailout bill, rather than just propping up big business, this is a perfect way to show it.

While certainly not a perfect system, clinics serving college students and low-income women used to be able to offer substantially subsidized birth control. When I was in school, my student health center offered birth control for $5 or $10 for a month's supply, depending on what type you used. Enter the Deficit Reduction Act, which took effect in January 2007. It was intended to keep pharmaceutical companies from abusing Medicaid reimbursements, but it had an unforseen consequence of prohibiting longstanding arrangements between drug companies and clinics that allowed clinics to buy and distribute contraceptives at extremely discounted rates. In the wake of the Deficit Reduction Act, birth control costs for the women who use these clinics has gone up by as much as 1000%.

So it's not as though this subsidizing birth control access is a zany, untested idea. We know it's important. We've done it in the past. Let's dial back the flipping out, or at least refocus it in other directions. Peronally, this irritation has been keeping me warm at night.