Saving for a Wedding

A lot of you probably saw on my various social media accounts that I proposed to my girlfriend and she said yes. I couldn’t be happier for the engagement, and now the fun part starts: planning a wedding. You don’t have to worry; I won’t be live-blogging every decision we make. I’m sure there are guides out there on how to plan a wedding already from much more credible sources than me, but I do want to talk about some of the practical things I come across in this adventure. The first is that we need to save some money in order to have the wedding that we want to have. Here are some of the things I’m doing.

The first thing I’m going to do is actually save. I’m lucky enough to have a full time job as well as teach courses at The University of Scranton. With 2 streams of income, one of them can go directly into Savings without me worrying about making ends meet. On top of that, the way I manage my finances is pretty simple: maintain a certain balance in my checking account; this balance is generally more than I’ll actually need for the foreseeable future. I can reevaluate that a bit more and see how much I actually need to keep in it, deeming anything over that disposable. Any disposable income from now on goes right to savings.

Next thing I did/am doing is creating a monthly budget. I, like everyone else, have monthly expenses. This includes rent, electric, Internet, phone bills, etc. I also have several monthly subscriptions to various streaming services, hosting accounts, and more. My job over the next few weeks is to eliminate and downgrade what I can. That is money that I either don’t need to spend, and or can spend less of.

Similarly, I’m just going to spend less money in general. My friends like to poke fun at the fact that I’m an impulse buyer. I’ll see a deal come across my Twitter feed or decide I ‘need’ something and just buy it. From now until the wedding, I’ll have a much stricter definition of ‘need’. I’ve already removed Twitter accounts that I follow for deals, moving them to a list that I only look at around Christmas. Removing that temptation is half of the battle for me.

Finally, I’m also lucky enough to have a regular (small) income from Amazon Associates and other affiliate programs, and royalty checks from books and online courses I’ve developed. All of that money will go directly into Savings from here on out. It’s not much, but it will add up, especially since I was getting a lot of it in the form of Amazon gift cards.

How do you save money? What tips do you have? Let me know in the comments!