till debt do us part

Tondella

nabowla wrote:

Putting the rights and wrongs of spending £10k on the wedding to one side, the first thing you need to do is to draw up your monthly budget as it stands at the moment. Then, come back to us for lots of suggestions about how to make huge savings. For example, how much are you both spending on your mobile bills every month? Which provider are you using for your landline at the moment? How much is your monthly food shopping bill? It'll be harder for your fiance to make savings as so many of the costs of living in the Mess are fixed but even he ought to be able to spend more wisely without changing his lifestyle too drastically. If he changes mobile provider to get a cheaper deal he might even get a brand new phone thrown in for free - and I've yet to meet a military guy who doesn't jump at the chance of getting a new gadget to play with!!!

Once you've cut back on your monthly expenditure you can throw the savings at reducing the debts as quickly as possible. By far the most expensive debt is your fiance's credit card bill so put all the extra money towards this rather than your interest-free loans. As for moving your fiance's debts onto a card in your name, only you can make the final decision. Under normal circumstances I'd think it might be worth considering but you have to bear in mind that he's in the military. At the moment his insurance would pay off his debts if the worst happened. If the debts were in your name, you might well find that the insurance wouldn't pay up. Would you really want the added stress of trying to pay off the debts under such awful circumstances?

There are a couple of financial products designed specifically for military personnel who find it difficult to get credit cards etc due to frequent changes of address. I think they're a bit more expensive than the 0% rates you might get but it would be worth seeing whether they are cheaper than the standard Lloyds rate. It doesn't cost anything to investigate your options! If you could reduce the interest even by 1 or 2%, that would be more money to throw at reducing the capital. Good luck.

Hi Nabowla,

We are both currently on orange, OH pays £50 pcm for a package with some free day and evening calls. He is often called on to make phone calls from his mobile on behalf of work and so gets penalised on tariffs that prohibit daytime calls. I'm on a basic £20 pcm that gives me 500 free texts and 1000 mins pcm free calls to orange and landlines. This means I can speak to OH daily for free as well as calling the folks. I have a landline at the flat and it is BT (dah dah dah). I rarely use it for outgoing calls, unless I need to make daytime ones in the week (rare). it gets occasional use for the internet (Tiscali pay as you go). BT's minimum DD payment is £22, on this rate I am normally in credit with the phone company.

you're going to make me switch from BT aren't you?!

James240

Hi tondella

Just to put into perspective i owe just over a £1000 more than u want to spend on a wedding and it will take me untill jan 2009 to pay it all off. Thgis costs me approx £300 a month and i am so !!!!!! at myself for getting into this situation as i work two jobs and i could do so much with that extra £300 a month that i am paying for the loan. It is my fault though and i am determined to pay it off though.

my point is your other half has £20k worth of debt already, p[ut this ontop of the 10k that u want to spend on that wedding and its going to take u an age to pay off that debt. and basically it will be hanging round ur head for a fair few years.

I dont mean to be mean bout the wedding but is it worth spending £10k When all the money is really going on other people?

Dont take my words to harshly as i just wanted to point out how long £10k by its self takes to pay off

All the best

James x

wisbech_lad

Tondella - if there are strong financial reasons to get married and the religious aspect is no big deal - why not elope next month? Two witnesses/ registry office.

You can have the reception at any time.

My proposal to my wife probably wasn't much different - I work for an airline, so pointed out the cheap ticket deals. (actually, they were available for SO as well as legal spouses, but this was one I didn't want to let slip, so...)

Tondella

Hi wisbech_lad

It would really break our mothers' and our own hearts to elope. I know that this is a money saving website but not everything can reduce down to a financial transaction. What about celebrating two people joining two families together? The £10k has already come down to £7.5k overnight and you can bet your bottom dollar that I'll be working hard to get it down further over the coming months. I'll be picking garden flowers for the tables, getting a handful of blooms for my bouquet, asking for the wedding photo album as a wedding gift, baking my own cake, having a family friend DJ, cutting back on the honeymoon and checking out the money savers wedding chat forums too.

delboypass

Kill the £1k photographer as well. These days every one has a video camera or a digital camera. No need for expensive photographers any more.

wisbech_lad

Ah, I understand Tondella. But if there are months before the wedding, any chance of having the civil wedding first (for the benefits), and then the reception (at the previously planned time) as the celebration/ making your vows?

Would people even notice if you don't sign the registry at the same time?

As many of my friends are in multi-cultural marriages, this is something I've grown used to (legal marriage and celebrations being at different times and in different countries)

BTW - seriously I believe that the steps you are taking will make the ceremony far far meaningful and personal. The best parties/ events are rarely the ones with money thrown at them, but the ones with soul thrown at them.

My wife ended up in a fight with her parents over the wedding reception (they wanted 1000+ guests, and to pay for it, arguing that if they didn't invite everyone they had ever known, people would assume they didn't approve of her marrying out of her culture/race - she wanted and got under 100) But it was alright on the night, and better for the informality of it. IMHO!

margaretclare

wisbech_lad wrote:

Tondella - if there are strong financial reasons to get married and the religious aspect is no big deal - why not elope next month? Two witnesses/ registry office.

You can have the reception at any time.

My proposal to my wife probably wasn't much different - I work for an airline, so pointed out the cheap ticket deals. (actually, they were available for SO as well as legal spouses, but this was one I didn't want to let slip, so...)

Oh no. I wouldn't advocate this. My elder daughter had the ultimate in MSE weddings, Lincoln register office (her OH was at RAF Scampton at the time), and we were told about it by his dad on the phone the following day.

I have never seen anyone, man or woman, cry as her Dad cried that Sunday morning. As for me, it was years before I could even walk past a wedding photographer's window in the town centre, and the following summer it was the big royal wedding (Charles and Di) and where I was working they introduced TV sets onto all the wards so that no one could escape having it rammed down their throat...

My younger daughter had a lovely wedding, well-planned, very individual - the theme was 'The Railway Children' and we copied the costumes accurately, reception on a preserved steam train, but she walked up the aisle on her own because her Dad had died. So he did not get to give either daughter away. My elder daughter felt she had to have a 'proper do' and she had a rededication of vows in church for her 20th anniversary, but again, her Dad wasn't there and by then I was remarried!

Don't elope - it is so, so hurtful.

Aunty Margaret

nabowla

Tondella wrote:

you're going to make me switch from BT aren't you?!

How did you guess???!

I switched from BT to TalkTalk about six months ago after reading postings on the the MSE Telephones Board. I still have to pay line rental to BT (c. £10 per month) as there are only a limited number of companies that can provide the line itself. However, I have unlimited free local and national evening and weekend calls from TalkTalk. TalkTalk charge me absolutely nothing for this service - just for any peak daytime calls I make (which I never use as I'm at work). So, my total landline bill is now only £10 per month - a huge saving on what I used to spend when BT provided the calls as well as the line! I even got £20 credited to my TalkTalk 'bill' when I signed up thanks to a recommendation from another MSE user (and I'm still £20 in credit). Have a look on the Telephones Board to see whether there's anything similar on offer at the moment.

As for the mobiles, have a look at Martin's article:http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/cgi-bin/viewnews.cgi?newsid1099157672,92885, If you want to stay with Orange, start by sussing out the cheapest deals that other companies would offer you as a new customer and that meet your needs. Then, ring up Orange and tell them that you're not happy with your current package and that you could get xxx package if you went to xxx company (Martin's article explains how to do this in much more detail). I know quite a few people who have done this. Not only have they cut the cost of their bills, they've also got a new handset for free.

The Army guys I work with love talking about getting the best 'bang for buck'. So, why not get your fiance to sit down and do the hard work - tell him to think of it as a logistical planning exercise looking at 'bangs for bucks', with the added bonus of a free gadget at the end :-) It's also focusing his mind on a project with a positive outcome rather than something that'll make him feel gloomy/guilty about his debts - I don't know why, but guys do seem to take this sort of thing better than telling them they've got to cut out their luxuries!

Tondella

Hi delboypass

you raise an interesting point about the photographer. The reason we chose to go professional is because the wedding photos are the only physical memory of the wedding day. My Dad died when I was nine and my parent's wedding photos are something I still look at as they are one of the few occasions in which they appear in the same photo (us kids arrived soon after and so it was one parent to take the photo, one to star in it). We don't know anyone from the family who would be up to the task of photographer and leaving it down to all of the guests means 20 or so people clamouring to get the best shot. We're hiring the photographer for the essential parts of the day: ceremony, guest shots then one quick one of cake cutting before we sit for dinner (cake will be served for dessert). Then are more relaxed about guests taking their own shots of the speeches and disco. The photographer I will probably choose has a very comprehensive price list so you can see where your money goes and I'll certainly look back over it and see if we can't economise further by making up our own album (which will be on the gift list), getting fewer and smaller prints etc.

Tondella

margaretclare wrote:

Oh no. I wouldn't advocate this. My elder daughter had the ultimate in MSE weddings, Lincoln register office (her OH was at RAF Scampton at the time), and we were told about it by his dad on the phone the following day.

I have never seen anyone, man or woman, cry as her Dad cried that Sunday morning. As for me, it was years before I could even walk past a wedding photographer's window in the town centre, and the following summer it was the big royal wedding (Charles and Di) and where I was working they introduced TV sets onto all the wards so that no one could escape having it rammed down their throat...

My younger daughter had a lovely wedding, well-planned, very individual - the theme was 'The Railway Children' and we copied the costumes accurately, reception on a preserved steam train, but she walked up the aisle on her own because her Dad had died. So he did not get to give either daughter away. My elder daughter felt she had to have a 'proper do' and she had a rededication of vows in church for her 20th anniversary, but again, her Dad wasn't there and by then I was remarried!

Don't elope - it is so, so hurtful.

Aunty Margaret

definitely have no plans to elope, the most important part of this wedding day is for us to stand up in front of our family and friends and show our commitment to each other.