I’m Engaged!! What This Means for my Life and my Finances

Soooo, the cat is out of the bag. I got engaged on Sept. 1!!!! I’ve been meaning to tell you all on here, but I wanted to get my thoughts together first instead just rambling on and being all over the place. Plus, it’s still a lot to process.

Here’s How it All Went Down

It was a morning engagement, which is pretty much unheard of these days. Most engagements I hear about happen at night usually during the dessert portion of a classy anniversary meal, or at the top of the ferris wheel on a perfect night.

Mine happened at about 6:30 a.m. We both get up pretty early for work. I get up around 5 am so I can blog and work and freelance tasks and he rolls out of bed around 6. I was sitting at the table pecking away on a post for a client when he woke up and we greeted each other.

I didn’t think anything of him shuffling around in the morning and didn’t even notice him setting anything up, haha. I’m pretty in my zone during my morning work session so it was the perfect time for the surprise.

He got my attention and told me he was going to wake our son up but first he needed to ask me something and called me back into our room. I heard music playing and saw rose petals on the floor leading into our room and there he was kneeling down on one knee with a beautiful ring.

I was shocked! I didn’t cry like I thought I would. I’m not a super emotional person and I can’t force myself to cry but the moment was still very special to me. Looking back it was a perfect, simple and intimate moment. Probably one of the best Tuesdays I’ve ever had.

When we both got home in the evening, we ate barbecue for dinner and I baked a cake to celebrate.

What This Means for My Life

Getting married is a big, life changing ordeal obviously. I knew that I wanted to marry Ray one day, but you can never be mentally prepared enough for a big step in life like this. It’s almost like having a child. You’re never 100% ready until you start living out your new life. You still need to be mature enough and mentally prepared for the change, but a single person who’s never been married probably can’t fully grasp the overall concept and experience of what married like is like.

Even though we’re both parents and share a lot of expenses together, I’m so used to being independent, making my own money and my own decisions. I’m going to have to change all my ‘I’s’ to ‘We’.

We’ve talked about our goals and plans 10+ years down the road and seem to be on the same page about everything. Our relationship has been no where near perfect but we’ve made our differences work and been there for each other unconditionally. I’m thankful for all the not-so-good moments we had in our relationship because now I know without a shadow of a doubt that he is here to stay through thick and thin and so am I.

I need to work on becoming 100% vulnerable and doing my part to trust my partner’s decisions and choices. I’m a major control freak and I’m so used to always calling the shots. But since marriage is about ‘we’ and not ‘I’ I’ll need to tone down on my need for control and I feel like it’s for the best.

What This Means for My Finances

I know that when I get married, my debt and his debt will become ‘our debt’ and I’m okay with that. He took out a little less student loans than I did, but as I’m rapidly paying down my debt I understand that it will increase by quite a bit once we get married.

Being in debt has held us back from getting engaged but we’ve considered married for quite a while now. Sooooo, we plan to get married next spring and have traditional ‘dream’ wedding. Well, a dream wedding on a budget of course.

Since we’re both floating in debt right now (no longer drowning) the most logical solution would be to pay our debt off before having a big wedding. There’s one problem with that though. WE. JUST. CAN’T. WAIT. I have a plan that will allow us to pay for the entire wedding in cash and take a nice honeymoon right after. Lord knows I need a vacation.

Since the wedding won’t add to our debt, I’m all for it. At the end of the day, I don’t want my debt to define me. I’ve already made so many sacrifices and I’ll continue to make sacrifices for the next few years in order to get my finances in order.

But the day that I become debt free is not promised. Heck, next spring is not even promised and I need to do something for myself right now and live in the moment just a little bit. Living for only the future may lead you to success, but it may also leave you with quite a few regrets.

I’m excited to start planning my wedding NOW, marry the man of my dreams next year and pay for it all in cash!

So get ready for all the thrifty wedding posts as I plan this shindig. You’ve been warned.

We have weekly money meetings to discuss our financial goals and progress, but we actually don’t want to combine finances until the start of 2017. I know this sounds like an abomination to the unwritten financial rules of marriage and harmony, but it just seems like it’s going to work for us. I should have all my debt paid off by 2017 and I’ll still share my own personal debt progress next year but I’ll respect his privacy when it comes to his.

We will still split expenses, talk about our financial goals, share money as needed, tell each other everything and budget together but we won’t have joint accounts until 5-6 months after the wedding. I know it sounds weird, but it’s just what works for us in our situation.

It would be ideal to run out and get shared accounts the minute we say our vows, but there will still be a lot to sort out like what we’re going to do about life insurance, healthcare and other factors. It’s a bit overwhelming, we will get it sorted out in due time.

So that pretty much sums up everything for now.

If you’ve dealt with debt before or if you’re currently dealing with it, have you ever committed to doing something BIG and semi-expensive for yourself? I already have a solid plan, but I’m always open to other opinions and suggestions. Do you have any tips or advice for me to help me plan an amazing wedding while still contributing large debt payments each month? Let me know!