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Archive for February, 2016

Less than 3 months!

February 22nd, 2016 at 02:13 pm

It's been busy over here. DF and I are both sick right now. He's staying home to rest today, but I unfortunately had meetings to be in for. I'm hoping to go home early though after my 1 pm meeting.

Things are moving along on the wedding front. Invites went out Saturday. I have a few to-dos including booking our getting ready hotel room, ordering the air puppets, and ordering travel shirts/groomsmen's ties. I also need our guest book, but I'm holding out for a 20% off coupon from Peachwik (I have a 10% as backup). Other than that, it's just finalizing details and paying off vendors. I've actually been semi-proud at how well we're doing. Considering how overbudget we are, we're still on track to have everything paid off in time for the wedding. Additionally, I've still been working on reducing the credit cards. We've paid no interest on the Marriott card (the one we put all wedding and most daily expenses on), and we're slowly paying down the other two cards that are 0%. Chase Slate has less than $500 (originally $900) and Capital One Venture has about $600 (originally $1100). I've started working on an order of payoffs for after the wedding. I'm hoping by the end of the year, we'll be down to just student loans and DF's car loan. It's lofty because that'll mean about $13k in debt payoff for the remainder of the year. Our wedding savings rate has been about 2k/month, so it is possible.

The end is in sight!

February 8th, 2016 at 02:49 pm

I finished up purchasing the last of our gifts last week. We still have the ties, but since those are more attire, I don't really count them.

All that's last money-wise is paying off our vendors, the car rental (I'm hoping to cover most, if not all, with points), and wedding week spending (wedding alcohol, RD food, mani/pedis, tips, and food/gas while in AZ). I feel like it's coming together, but I'm still super nervous. And our invites still haven't gone out (hopefully working on them tonight).

DF lost his phone at his friend's bachelor party the other night, so we'll have that expense as well if we need to get him a new one. He thinks he left it in the Uber car, so hopefully it turns up.

We also added DF to my car insurance and got him Tricare insurance since he turned 26 last month. Our car insurance will now be paid out of our joint account, so that's one more bill moved over. I increased my contribution to our account by 200 to account for it.

Back from Denver

February 1st, 2016 at 06:02 pm

This past weekend, my mom and I went to Denver for my hair and makeup trial with my cousin. We had found a great deal on flights ($100 each), used points for the hotel (plus, got an upgrade to a 2 bedroom suite!), and had my aunt bring us some groceries, so we only had to eat out once. My cousin is phenomenal, and I'm so lucky he's agreed to style me and my bridesmaids for the wedding. We're paying him as he's social media famous, and I want to make sure he's fairly compensated. I'm giving him $200 plus $100 to either his room or straight to him for all of our hair and my makeup. If the girls want makeup, he's only charging $25 which is crazy cheap for professional makeup.

Next up is invites. I did pretty well on those. My mom picked some kits up for $6 each, and while they don't really match my wedding at all, I managed to incorporate some small elements to tie it in. Printing them at home means I only have postage to cover. Yay for super cheap invites. About 80 for less than $100 with postage.

I can't believe it's getting so close! It's also encouraging that if everything works out, DF and I will have financed about 90% of it ourselves with the remaining bit coming from our parents. With our wedding coming pretty close to the average amount spent (about 30k), I feel confident about really getting back to hammering my debts once it's done. I certainly won't be debt free by thirty, but I'm going to seriously push for consumer debt-free!