How much does it cost to save a little money?

One of the most common tips to save money is to tell potential caterers that you’re planning a family function in order to avoid receiving the wedding upcharge. And in contacting caterers, that’s the line I used.

After contacting various people we finally found a strong contender. When I met with the caterer, they repeatedly talked about how they would treat this event like a wedding. And during the course of conversation I admitted that the meal would be served at our wedding reception which would be the concluding event of what will essentially be a family reunion. The next day they e-mailed me and said that they were withdrawing their proposal because they didn’t want to work with someone who would perpetrate such a “deception.”

I was totally flummoxed. In fact, I still kind of am. How does not specifying the type of family function equal a deception? At the same time though, I know I would have felt uncomfortable leaving our in-person meeting without them knowing that it was going to be a wedding, particularly since they kept mentioning how they were going to treat our event like one. So was this a sin of omission (by not saying family wedding rather than family function)? Or was this just the way for the caterer to not work the event because they’d have preferred a higher profit margin on a wedding?

As someone who likes to think of herself as taking the moral high road, I can’t fully tell why I’m feeling argumentative about this. Is it because I truly think I was in the right, or is it because I hate being caught in a lie? But was it really a lie?

I’m obviously still working through this issue, and I’m looking forward to hearing the take of others. And Sara Cotner of 2000 Dollar Wedding found the issue interesting and is planning on covering it in an upcoming blog post. I’ll let y’all know when that happens. But anyone care to share their perspective on this in the meantime? Have I lost some of my ethical standing because of this, just to save some money?

Image from Microsoft Office.

Keeping the A-listers separate from the B-listers

Guest lists are supposedly one of the biggest problems that arises during wedding planning. Thankfully, that is now pretty much past for us. We have his side, my side, our parents' sides. The trouble is, save-the-dates.

Now, we're not actually doing real save-the-dates. There will be no cute photos or magnets or other such things going through the postal system. Instead we're planning on sending out an e-mail that includes our wedding website's address.

And it's really the announcement of the wedding website that we're more interested about, because all the people who are really important to us already know the date. But we want people to know about the website because we already have those in-crowd members who are booking flights and looking at hotels, and we want them to know about the great hotel rate we got for them as well as about the weekend of events we intend to have. Heck, there are even uninvited people who want our registry info so they can get us a gift! (And no, we haven't registered yet.)

So, what's the problem? Well, there are some people on the guest list that we don't anticipate coming. Particularly some of the relations that we haven't seen in 20 or so years, and are really only inviting because this event is also important to our parents. Our fear is that in sending everyone on the guest list a save-the-date, that some people who wouldn't ordinarily come might start thinking about it and decide to come anyway. Because we're getting married in the awesome city of New Orleans. At a time of year when most of our guests will be starting to have frigid temperatures in their own locations, but we'll probably have very temperate weather. So they might decide to make a little vacation out of it, with the pretext that they're coming for my wedding. And this we do not want.

Though our families realize that not all invited guests will attend, it might cause quite a bit of drama if some people receive an e-mail notification and others do not. Some think we should just send a save-the-date to the A-listers now, and then a second one closer to the wedding. Except for the fact that many A-listers are related to B-listers and they are bound to talk about the wedding and find out that some have received the e-mail while others haven't (as in some are parents-children, or siblings). So then do we exclude A-listers who are likely to talk with the B-listers? Or do we just send the e-mail to everybody and expect that people who wouldn't ordinarily come still won't come just because they've received 7 months notice?

Note: though we're talking A-list and B-list, everyone is on the guest list.

Getting with the program

Alright, I've been a bit lax about posting anything lately. There have been instances when I'm just overcome with so much wedding stuff that I don't know where to start writing. Other times there's been such deep turmoil about various issues that I just hunker down and stew about an it, without writing. And then there's been life, with nothing at all to do with weddings.

But I'm resolving to do better. I plan to post three times a week, on Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday. And I'm even thinking about having a type of subject for each day of the week. Tuesdays would be about things specific to my wedding, Thursdays about more global wedding issues, and Sundays would be more like an idea brainstorm. Of course, I'm more concerned about posting regularly than making sure that each post fits the theme for that day of the week, so we'll see. Anyway, get ready for another post, because one's coming soon!

Father knows best?

Okay, I've never seen Father Knows Best. But I was talking to someone tonight about the wedding planning, specifically, talking about my indecision between using paper/plastic table products (tablecloths, tableskirts, dishes, silverware, etc) versus using real stuff (i.e. linen tablecloths & napkins; real plates and cups, etc). And though there's a history of informal weddings in my family, I want to make sure that the wedding is tasteful. And though I've had family members use the paper/plastic products before at a wedding (the one I know it happened at was a 2nd wedding...can't remember about three first weddings if they were used or not), I'm still not sure about it.

Which brings us to Father Knows Best. Because most of my family is very easy going, but my dad has more particular tastes. And he is contributing to the expenses of my wedding. So I figure I'll ask and find out if he even cares what I use. If he does, then I'll go with what he chooses. If he doesn't care, then I'm back in the land of indecision. But for all the brides that complain about meddling parents in wedding planning, here's one place where I don't mind getting some extra input!

Picture from tvshowsondvd.net

Will you please shoot me?

After a lengthier process than many brides go through (my anal ways don't allow me to not research every, single option) I have reserved my photographer. She's wonderful. In addition to photography, she majored in peace and global studies in college (how cool is that?). Besides shooting weddings, she also goes down to Central America and shoots some amazing photos of the people down there). She goes to my church (which we didn't realize before we met). And because she just recently moved down here from New York City, her prices are a steal. Her name? Jennie Aleshire. All photos in this post are by Jennie Aleshire. (And yes, she does shoot in color. But these are two of my favorite photos of hers, and they just happen to be in black and white.)

Catching my breath

Things are finally beginning to settle down a little so that my life is no longer so hectic. And when I say things, I mean wedding planning. Before getting engaged I thought about all the things that would be cool to do for the wedding, and had various ideas, but it wasn't getting down to the nitty gritty, as that was supposed to be for when we were actually engaged. I thought the nitty gritty stuff would be pretty easy since I had done some research beforehand. I was wrong. Okay, my research probably did help me over all the completely clueless brides who hadn't given their wedding one thought, but not as much as I thought it would.

First there was the stress of trying to find out the wedding budget. This involved developing a tactical plan of how to assuage sensitive personalities and work diplomatically through the landmines that are family politics.

Then I attended a bridal show where I was practically the only bride getting married in 2010 as everyone else was planning a wedding in 2011 or 2012, for crying out loud. And nearly all the vendors were horrified at how little time I was leaving myself to get the planning done. Panic started to set in.

I had to multitask. I had to get save-the-dates because I needed enough people to respond so I could have a ballpark number of attendees while talking to caterers . But how tacky is it to not have the save-the-dates coordinate with the invitations? So I was looking at all my invitation options and comparing the costs.

I had to figure out if I was really going to do a fellowship hall reception, or if it wouldn't be a better deal to have it somewhere else. So an investigation of reception sites ensued, as well as caterers, to see where I would be better off.

And at the bridal show there were already several photographers who were booked up on the day of my Sunday wedding in November, 9 months away. So I had to research photographers whose work I loved at a price I could stomach.

Lastly, if I was doing save-the-dates then I would want to put down our wedding website's address. But what would it be? Would we pay for our own domain name or use one of the free sites? Which wedding website hosts had the best services, or templates that worked well for us, or...? Again, one more thing added to the list of things to accomplish NOW.

But now that I've made some decisions, things can slow down and I can start to appreciate the process. I'm not doing stationery save-the-dates (more on that in a different post). We've decided to use the fellowship hall. We're this close to signing our photographer. And our wedding website has been born. Not bad for being engaged for 3 weeks. Now I feel as though we can relax a little and make decisions with less pressure on us.

And this will be my last post until next week because tomorrow I head to a wedding in New York and won't get back until Sunday evening. So have a fabulous weekend and I'll catch you next week!

When do they find the time?

You would think that once I became engaged that the posts would just start flowing. And frankly, there's a lot of stuff I could be talking about. But now that I actually have to do the planning, I have no time to write! No time to cogitate and reflect back on everything that's going on. Because there's a certain number of hurdles I've got to jump over in a rather quick amount of time (or so WIC seems to tell me) and between my job, and my life, and all this searching, I just don't have time to post. So how do all these other bloggers find the time to do this stuff? Or do they just wait until they're later in the process? Or do they just take longer than 9 months to plan a wedding?