Our wedding day finally arrived! The day my wife (that STILL is strange to write) and I had been planning and eagerly awaiting for over one and a half years finally arrived. A few weekends ago, we looked each other in the eyes, exchanged our vows, and began this amazing new chapter of our lives. The two-day celebration flew by and to be honest, a lot of it is still a blur (which we were told by everyone would happen). I am still honored that so many friends and family members took the time to celebrate with us. Man, what an awesome few days.
I don’t want to use this article to detail every single minute of the wedding, every single detail, etc. There are so many specific details and the commentary about each detail would turn that into one long/boring article. I’ll be happy to share that with you privately if interested though haha So instead of describing every moment that occurred, I wanted to just tell you about my favorite moment of the day. The best moment of the wedding was the 30 minute time frame that began right before the ceremony at the church and ended with me breaking a glass and walking down the aisle for the first time as a married couple. My wife and I decided a long time ago that the first time we wanted to see each other on the wedding day was when she was walking down the center aisle of the church towards the altar. A little traditional, I know; but for us, there was something special about waiting until the ceremony to see each other for the first time. In fact, she was so strict about it that I was banned from accessing her phone for the last 9 months because it had pictures of her wedding dress on it.
The church design did not make this easy. To help all of you visualize the next few sentences, picture a semi-circle in your mind. Instead of walking down right down the center aisle, we all had to enter the church from the far right corner and walk towards the center aisle. Once you reached the center aisle, you turned left and walked down the main aisle to the altar. Does that make sense? What made it difficult was that my wife walked for quiet some time before reaching the center aisle. Both her and the priest told me that I was not allowed to look right and watch her approach the center aisle. No, my head was locked looking forward because as she “quietly” reminded me the night before, I WAS NOT allowed to see her before she began walking down that aisle. Those were the longest couple of minutes of my life, especially because I could see everyone else turned towards her watching her approach the altar. But you know what, it was all worth it when she turned left and began walking towards the altar. I finally got to see my beautiful bride, in her beautiful dress walking towards me, on the most important day of our lives. It is impossible to describe, but that was the best feeling I have ever experienced/ Period. I just can’t put into words how excited I was at that moment in time. For those of you who are married, I’m sure you know the feeling I am talking about. That right there, that feeling, was my favorite part of the wedding day. Everything else about the day was icing on the cake!
I was engaged for 18 months and the planning phase of the wedding required an insane amount of detail. Why did it take me so long to finally write about the wedding then? To be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure how to write about the wedding or our planning strategy. Sure, there are a ton of financial topics to cover during the wedding. If Lanny thinks he can write a lot about his house expenses, I can’t wait for his reality check when he one day gets engaged and starts planning a wedding. I could tell you that we did X, Y, and Z during the planning phase of our wedding to save money. Heck, I could have written that article 10 different times. But it wouldn’t have meant anything if the plan to save money delivered poor results on the wedding day. Now that the wedding is over and I have had some time to reflect, I finally figured out the strategy on how I wanted to share my experiences on this blog. So here is a preview. Think of the next paragraph as the back cover of a book.
The wedding process taught me a lot and I had many financial reality checks during the process. In my head, I was going to come in, show the vendors who was boss, and negotiate every quote to the lowest price possible and squeeze those corporate suckers dry. Then…I learned who really has the leverage in the wedding process. Trust me, it wasn’t us…one of the hundreds of couples that were getting married in Cleveland in the month of May. But that doesn’t mean we quit trying to keep the costs of the wedding as low as possible. We found other ways. In the end, I learned a lot during this process and cannot wait to share my experiences with all of you and hope that it will benefit you one day. Over the next few months, I will post a few different articles about a variety of topics. I know there will be at least two articles that I am going to start writing soon. One article will be titled something like “Why We Didn’t Use a Budget for our Wedding” and one will be titled something like “5 Ways We Reduced the Costs of Our Wedding.” Lanny and I love “Top 5” list articles and it was only natural that a wedding produces at least one Top 5 list for the page haha So everyone, stay tuned! And please, if you think of better titles, do not be afraid to let me know in the comments section.
One other quick thing. I was hoping to keep all of this a surprise until this article. I tried to be vague in my monthly dividend income; however, Investment Hunting cracked the case and was the first to figure out that I got married! Thanks everyone for taking the time to read my story today. I’m really looking forward to sharing more of my experiences with you about this special day in the coming months.
-Bert