#350: "newbie mistakes" series, post #3: spending 'with benefits'.

we're not having an october wedding. fiance pointed out that it's only fair to our out-of-towners to give them enough notice to be able to join us. and...i agree. so that means we're going to host an april 2009 wedding. which means i have 8 en.ti.re. months to plan. drag.

maybe it's because i've been compiling ideas for over a year now. or maybe i'm just totally impatient. or maybe it's because i prefer to make fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants decisions and not think about things for too long. {case in point, i bought my wedding dress at the sample sale. and no, it's not the margherita. but yes, it sure is an amy kuschel design. lord. did i just f*ck up our $10k budget. perhaps. but that's an entry for another day.} but i'm kind of feeling like LET'S GO GO GO GO GO GO GO! and...8 months just...sounds almost close to forever.

getting to the point, today's post is neutral to the actual decision i made in buying my wedding dress and centers more around the misstep in how i paid for it.

fiance and i have always known that we would be paying for our own wedding. we're both children of standard middle-class families and whilst we would appreciate (and accept) any monetary gifts from our parents, we do not want to be dependent on nor expect any financial help from our families to throw our bash.

and though the wedding industry would have you believe otherwise, spending $10,000 on one day to jumpstart the rest of your life...is a lot. but, regardless of whether you're spending $10,000 or $800,000...and especially if you're funding it yourself...you should absolutely make it work for you.

oh hello mileage-earning credit cards.


from southwest

the mistake i made? being ill-prepared to make wedding purchases.

you see, i bought my wedding dress myself. fiance and i had never discussed how we would make our wedding purchases. well i guess it's because we're still 8 months out...and uh, also because neither of us in our wildest dreams thought i'd go to my first sample sale and come out with my wedding dress. eh, but i did.

so with the understanding that wedding purchases are going to pop up (sometimes unexpectedly) in the upcoming months, we agreed to the following action plan. i don't have a mileage card. but he does. so he's going to get a second card in my name asap so we could wholly take advantage of the mileage benefits. this makes sense to us because 1) it'll make the purchases easy to keep track of and 2) the benefits will be piled onto one card instead of being split between the two of us which will hopefully end up in more rewards.

mo' money mo' mileage.