pre-wedding « love library

My empty, but gorgeous wallet.

I talk a big game when it comes to budgets. I make lists and spreadsheets. I even use math! But I’m not great at actually carrying out a budget. On Fridays I really want to go out for a dinner and a couple of drinks. A $4.00 coffee sounds totally reasonable when I’ve been up since 6 am and I have to work late. And somehow a trip to the drug store for a $5.00 bottle of lotion always turns into a $40 affair.

I’m a impulsive spender. It’s bad, I know. But since George and I are primarily paying for the wedding, I’ve been trying so, so hard to save money. The following tips are inspired by Adrienne who has some awesome ideas for saving dough! Totally jealous that she can ride her bike to work!

Here is what George and I have been doing:

Attempting to eat everything out of the pantry and fridge before we go to the grocery store. (I particularly hate this one. I have an aversion to left-overs and weird food combos.)
Attempting to make cheaper recipes. As someone who needs to eat gluten-free, I’m not loving this one either. We’ve mostly just been eating a lot of eggs…
I negotiated to have our rent lowered until our oven is fixed. (It’s been broken for 2 months!) I’d rather have a working oven, but hey, it saves me a few bucks.
George has been selling art.
I sold a couple of gift cards I had lying around to Plastic Jungle, which I highly recommend if you ever get a gift card you don’t want.
And this summer I plan to sell some clothes that I no longer wear on Copius. (Update: I went ahead and put a few items up.)

All of these little things help, but I feel like it’s nearly impossible to save a significant amount of money before the wedding in December. Things keep coming up! (An $80 doctor appointment! Yikes!)

We’ve talked about delaying the honeymoon until the summer, which will save some money, but after all this, I need a break!

Do you have any budgeting tips? I’d love to hear ‘em and make a big ol’ list for everyone!

love,
melanie

Picture by Mr. T in DC on Flickr

The kind of diet I am about to talk about is probably not the kind of diet you were expecting. Instead of going on a nutritional diet before the wedding, I’m going on a social media diet.

I’ve unsubscribed to most of the wedding blogs I follow, unfollowed a great deal of my twitter users and deleted most of the social media apps off my phone. Why have I done this? Because of the simple reason that I believe it is contributing to my unhappiness with planning my own wedding and maybe even contributing to unhappiness in other aspects of my life as well. See: Are Friends’ Happy Pictures Making You Sad? Or as Theodore Roosevelt once said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” And boy, was he ever right.

I’m not trying to cut myself off completely from the world. After all, I did decided to keep this blog. But I did think long and hard about deleting it.

I’ve been putting a lot of pressure on myself to work on the blog and do a million other things that in the grand scheme of things don’t really matter. I need time in my life to go outside, to play and to do things that aren’t “productive.” I’ve decided to begin blogging for myself. It isn’t fun for me to blog on a schedule. If I don’t feel like writing one day, I won’t. I was approaching this like a job instead of a hobby. I already have one job, I don’t need or want another one.

So you may hear less from me in the future, or you may hear more. Who knows. And that’s the way I like it.

Did you ever have to put yourself on a social media diet?

love,
melanie

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