A Year of Fasting

Have you noticed that you probably haven't seen us out and about much lately? Yeah, we are staying home. Don't worry, it's not you, it's us. We are on a spending fast. In our effort to get rid of what's toxic in our lives in 2013, we need to be honest with ourselves and how toxic our debt really has become to us.

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Chill Out, Things Gonna Change

A while back I posted about how our  wedding budget had pretty much crashed and burned. Well, I'm happy to say that things are looking up! No, we didn't win the lottery or anything like that. We haven't even had to make huge cuts to the wedding budget. Instead, I went through all of our wedding projects, our budget, looked at all of it and then figured out how I could make it work by changing little things, but not actually giving anything up.

While doing all of this I went through everything in our mountain of wedding projects and separated it into what was for the actual wedding on Maui and what was for the  reception at home. Doing this I was able to see how much we still had to do, needed to buy and how much we needed to take with us to Maui for the wedding. I was pretty excited to really be able to see how little there was left to do. There really is a light at the end of the DIY wedding projects tunnel! Plus, we had so much less than I thought to take with us for the wedding. I'm still riding the high of both of this realizations! hehe

Doing this, I figured out exactly what I still needed. Only five things! And ordered 2 of them, aqua baker's twine and glassine bags, right then and there. Another of the items, craft paint, I will pick up later this week. The last two items I will have to wait until after all the at home reception RSVPs come in and I have a final headcount. I wouldn't want to order too many or not enough.

Video Killed the Wedding Budget

When we first started figuring out our wedding budget, hiring a videographer never even made the list. Actually, it never even crossed our minds. I hadn't even thought of it until I stared wedding surfing on the interwebs. My first thought was what a waste of money. I mean who really wants to sit around and watch that?

Then I saw my friend Sarah's wedding video and it made me want one. Since Sarah also got married on Maui, I contacted her videographer. His prices were fair and I was already to move forward when I realized that there was no way we could afford a videographer. It would completely break our wedding budget and we were already having a hard enough time coming up with the funds for everything. I quickly shelved my idea of having a wedding video. But, I kept thinking about it.

One day I came across the idea of having your friends and family film your wedding video and then sending it somewhere to have it edited. You could even rent small video cameras from different companies to do this. One that I came across was WeddingMix with the tag line, Let the people you care about the most capture your story on video for memories you can't get anywhere else. But I wasn't completely sold.

Then my BFF/MOH sent me an email with the title,  WATCH THIS. In the email I found, a video link and one sentence from her, "It's going to make you cry." And cry I did! I was hooked! I had to have a wedding video! Especially since we were having a destination wedding with very few guests there. It would be so nice to show at our Portland celebration. Yes, my mind changed from no one wanting to watch this to everyone wanting to watch it. But, not a professional one; one we could do ourselves.