Budgeting for a same-sex wedding has been interesting. In some ways it’s exactly how I expect budgeting for any wedding would be—we set our priorities, try to find deals, and cut corners on the things that don’t matter to us while putting more towards the things that do. But there have been a few places where having two women has made it confusing. Lynn’s mom, for example, has decided that Lynn is the groom. Or at least that her family is responsible for the traditional ‘groom’ stuff. Which is very generous, because now she’s offering to pay for the rehearsal dinner and all sorts of other little things on top of the money she initially gave us to help cover the wedding costs. So we’ve had the pleasure of telling her that she doesn’t have to pay for anything extra and that if we go over we’ll be paying for it ourselves.
That ‘paying for anything extra ourselves’ part has been the ruling factor in our wedding budgeting. Our families gave us a set amount specifically for the wedding, and another amount for the honeymoon. Of course, spending that money has been easy—and quick! Almost all of it went to the food, venue, and photographer (and the honeymoon fund to plane tickets). But everything else we need to pay for ourselves, so we’ve been hunting for deals. We’re not exactly debt-free at the moment between a new house, student loans and some lingering credit card debt, so the plan is to keep our contribution low enough that we’ll have the cash on hand on the wedding day to cover everything.
So everything has been about saving money. We’ve gotten all of the vases, candle holders and most other decorative stuff at thrift shops, along with two unopened boxes of print-your-own palm tree invitations–for $5! Almost everything else we’ve bought online. Since we don’t live in Florida getting things sent there directly has been really helpful. I’ve done a lot of shopping at websites that have things on clearance (thank you cards), free shipping (linens—it’s cheaper for us to buy than to rent, and we can resell them later), and sometimes even free stuff (we got our save the date and RSVP postcards for the cost of shipping, and they look amazing!). I <3 the internets!
Other than that, we’ve accepted help as gifts wherever possible—people have been incredibly generous. This is especially true of my sister who is designing and making BOTH of our wedding dresses in what little free time she has (I can’t even think how much it would cost to pay someone to do that). And we’ve started letting go of things that don’t matter as much to us (wedding favors have been the hardest for me to give up. Have you ever noticed that EVERYTHING starts to look like a good wedding favor after a while?) because we don’t want to pay for them.
In some ways I think it helps that we’re two women because our parents have always had it in the back of their minds that they would be paying for our weddings someday. I don’t know that it’s true in every family, but both sets of parents immediately offered to help when we announced our engagement, which made everything a lot easier for us. Without that money we’d be having a much different (read: smaller) wedding. Now we just have to sit them down again and go over the fact that neither of us is a groom (or that we both are) and hope that everything goes smoothly over the next 60-odd days.
