A good reason to not marry me is that I am not exactly a financial genius. While I’ve always been good at making my own money rather than asking for it (except for when I asked the federal government for $50,000 to go to college with and they were like, “Yes, def,”), paying bills the moment my paycheck dumps into my bank account, and shopping wisely at the grocery store, I am not terribly good at things like saving, planning ahead, or not going apeshit at Sephora on a weekly basis because I have an obsession with becoming a Rouge VIB cardholder as if that will somehow make me better-looking.
So when Joe and I sat down to do a dry run of the budget for our wedding a few months ago, needless to say, my heart fell into my colon. I was stressed. I was stressed to start Googling the real numbers behind this giant, amoebic “wedding” thing I’d convinced myself could cost between just $25 and $60 total if we tried hard enough, and I was stressed that Joe would finally see me for who I really was: a deeply indebted con lady with an incredibly well-appointed liquid eyeliner arsenal, who didn’t know how to save a single penny.
It’s not that we’d never talked about money—during the early days of our relationship, when I was at a soul-leeching job that paid peanuts, Joe would cheerlead me out of teary meltdowns when my checking account dipped into double-digits, over and over again. When we moved into our first apartment together, he, ever marriage material, volunteered to pay more than half of our expenses: he was debt-free, while my loans and lower salary put me at a handicap. And today, now that we’re more or less equal, I love where we stand on money. We’re both independent, hard-working, sometimes foolishly frivolous (me more so with makeup and flatforms; he less so with takeout and in the Playstation 4 marketplace), and off to a great start as life partners.
Unless, of course, I totally blow it in the wedding savings department and he realizes I have the financial skills of an upside-down turtle and leaves me for a woman who has an MBA and more than ten actual dollars to her name. This panic is what I felt when I realized —after lots of Googling, calculating, and factoring in contributions from our very generous families—we were left with a grand savings goal total of about $14,000. Not a big deal. Just almost the price of this decent-ass Italian boat.
Mind you, our wedding is not going to be a Kardashian/West-level affair, with white tigers serving caviar-packed knishes from silver platters strapped to their backs, so please spare me the lectures. This is for a basic, nice, happy wedding, a wedding we want to have, a wedding on a modest farm in a bramblefuck town in Maine, a wedding that will cash in at a grand total of around $25k-$30k, which is just below the national average. We will be sending our families very fancy, Papyrus-brand thank-you cards to express our gratitude for covering the venue, food, bar tab, and photographer. The rest is on us, that grisly $14,000, is on us.