It's coming...help!?

July 21st... just 16 days until the wedding!

After the big day, Jordan and I will be spending a week in Vegas for our honeymoon!  It'll be so much fun!

I'm going to do my best to write some good content for the three weeks around the wedding, but I'm not convinced that i'll be able to make it work everyday.

If any of my readers would honor me by writing a guest post (with links to your own blog if you have one) I would be very appreciative! If you are interested, just send me an email with your post to jessiesmoney@gmail.com and i'll schedule it in.

~thank you,
Jessie

July Check In

Jordan and I are on our second mission to come under $900 in our total variable spnding for a month - as of July 19, 2011 we're in good shape!  Just 17 more days to go before the cut off (August 5th, eek! that's one day before the wedding).

Wedding expenses not withstanding, i think we just might be able to do it!

oh!  The annual expense was my AMA membership and the wedding expense was from finally added my engagement ring and wedding band as named perils on our insurance.

Wedding Budget Update

A few people have asked or made reference to our wedding budget so i thought that today was a good day to post an updated.  In the image below you'll see what we expected things to cost, what they actually cost,  what we've paid so far and what's left to pay.

Anything in red is either no longer applicable or we decided not to do it.

Some things, like stationary - were a lot more expensive then i had expected and some things - like grat/taxes wound up being build into our costs - so we saved there.

I have cheques ready to pay the rest of the vendors on the day of (that my momma has offered to hold for us) and there are a few items (like the bar mix) that we won't be buying until the week before the wedding.

I feel like a post like this is better suited to questions/answers if you have any rather than me going line by line explaining things - so if you have any questions - ask away.

Wedding Jewelry!

sooo pretty!

I picked these gem's up on Saturday morning at Mappin's Jewelry.  I didn't really budget for this...at all...but realized i really wanted some jewelry to wear on the big day. We went to over a dozen stores or so before finding these.

The total came to just under $170 including tax - the set is sterling silver with Amethyst stones.

ps. i desperately need to update my wedding spending spreadsheet and commit to doing so this week and then posting an update.

Quick Update

So things have been crazzy this last little while with the wedding planning.

My acoustic guitarist for the ceremony and cocktail hour bailed for a better gig (okay fine, it could be a career maker for the guy but i'm still cranky about it) and we still hadn't confirmed our bartenders as of late last week.

I'm very excited to share that we have both of those issues now resolved.

Our new guitarist is amazing!  If you what to check out his folk music on myspace here's a link: http://www.myspace.com/tonybellandhisguitar/music/playlists/tony-bell-s-playlist-1214512

Also!  My venue operator found us a FLAIR bartender - which is very exciting.  He's going to work with a friend of my bridesmaid so that should work out pretty much perfectly.

yay!

My plan this evening is to go through the last few pages of the 'to do's in The Ultimate Wedding Planner - a book that my maid of honor gave me within days of being engaged.  I just want to make sure that we haven't forgotten anything.  This book has been extremely helpful so far!

Do You Groupon?

Groupon seems to be one of the hottest online couponing services out there right now!

If you haven't heard of it yet, Groupon offers unbeatable daily deals from top local businesses in over 100 cities. Each deal goes viral and often sells into the thousands.  It's pretty much incredible the discounts that they can offer!  

Today's offering (which I'm seriously thinking about) is 72% of tanning - which I was thinking of doing before the wedding and our honey moon in Vegas.  If you're interested in signing up and buying groupons, please feel free to use this link to sign up: http://www.groupon.com/r/uu21197911.  If you do, when you buy your first groupon - I'll get $10 and then you can get people to sign up too!!

June Spend Report

I can't believe that another month has gone by already!  It's July 6th - exactly one month from the wedding...crazy.  Anyway, on to the post at hand.

Jordan and I tried...and tried pretty hard to keep our spending in check this month.  In fact, in the last 10 months - we spent the very least this month (and I don't think it was thhhat hard).  BUT - we didn't meet our goal - we didn't keep our spending to $900 or less :(

When I did our mid-month check in we had spent just about $500 and we wound up spending another $1,000 from June 21st until July 5th - crazy!

In keeping our eating out (fairly) in check - I think I underestimated how much more we would spend in groceries.  Eating out has become such a big part of our lifestyle that it's taking time to adjust.

June/July are huge gift months for us as just about every birthday for our families fall then - it's tricky to keep this number down!

The home maintenance is just strange - i can't figure out what i thought was home maintenance before, and didn't when i re-ran the numbers...oops.


While I wouldn't call June a HUGE success by any means I do feel like Jordan and I are getting better and better about making good spending decisions.


Lets cross our fingers for July....can we beat June and spend less than $1,515?