Organization is Key

Wedding planning, at least the budgeting aspect, is a lot like travel planning. I have a lot of experience planning trips. I spent 12 years (since the age of 8) obsessively planning trips that I never ended up going on, and the past 6 years planning ones that I have. 

Budgeting for this wedding is much like budgeting for a big trip. Matt and I have been fortunate to have gone on three big trips since moving to Korea, four if you include going home for 3 weeks last year. While some people might think we are just swimming in money, that’s far from the truth. We have to strategically budget for every single aspect of the trip, starting months before departure. Thankfully, this experience has helped us tremendously. While the wedding is a super-budgeting monster, taking much more preparation, we have the necessary tools for successfully ensuring that everything gets paid, and gets paid in time (fingers crossed!)

Now that we have almost 5 months to go, every single dollar is accounted for. While most of our money is spent before pay day even arrives, this wedding is taking that to an exponential level. We have charts for the next 5 paychecks telling us when deposits are due, when to buy certain items, whether or not a project has to be done in Korea or the USA. The exchange rate and other living-outside-of-the-country hassles roar their ugly heads making the simple concept of “how much money do we have?” a lot harder than it has to be. While we can’t do anything about it, it’s frustrating when every month the exchange rate is different. Some months we lose more money, some months we don’t. We never know if what we want to send home will be the right amount. This has always been a pain since moving here, but now it’s a little more important. Every dollar, as one knows, counts.

While it seems unnerving, it’s also good in a way that we’re getting so close. Now we can sit back and have a pretty good grasp of our financial situation. When the wedding was months and months away, it was hard to tell where we’d be when it finally rolled around, it was difficult to budget.

It’s so exciting to know that our next big “trip” is this wedding. We were engaged almost 14 months ago. We’ve had two big trips between then and now, and so the countdown has always included other big ticket items. But now there is nothing left standing between us and MAINE and our WEDDING. To say that we’re getting anxious is an understatement!