Affluent but Frugal

I was recently fortunate enough to be in Germany for work and able to hop over to the Netherlands to visit an old friend of mine and meet her new baby! I promise, my life is normally not this glamorous. Since I live in the US, I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to try out EasyJet, a low-cost, no frills European carrier. No-frills is perfectly fine on a flight less than two-hours. It seems like they hardly finish serving beverages and we’re landing, did I need that ½ a soda for an extra 50 bucks added to my fare? Not really, no. Of course, I comparison shopped my one-way ticket from Berlin to Amsterdam which was surprisingly difficult. The lowest price “legacy” carrier was KLM (the Dutch national carrier) at around $160. EasyJet was offering fares for $85 from Berlin Schoenefeld to Amsterdam. Berlin Schoenefeld is the smaller Berlin airport but I didn’t really care about this, though it was a little further from my hotel. What really made my decision challenging was determi...

Over the 1 year planning period for our wedding we spent almost double what we normally would during that period. Our savings took a big hit. Ouch. We had money saved to pay for the wedding but we still put everything we could on a credit card in order to get our points. If we're going to spend a ton we might as well get some points from it that we could use for a honeymoon or gift cards or something. This would be level 1 - just making sure to use your normal cards. We went a step further and chased sign up bonuses to maximize our value and in doing so gave ourselves about a $4,000 wedding gift! Let me add,  I do not recommend going into debt to pay for a wedding. Have the wedding you can afford - this strategy is intended only to maximize the rewards from what you would spend anyway. We were originally planning to use the points from the wedding spending to pay for our honeymoon to Thailand but unfortunately some personal events have forced us to delay taking that...

Like many of you, our wedding is on a budget but we also want it to be nice for our guests (over half of which are traveling from out of state to attend). To keep on budget and be able to splurge on things like a nice dinner and open bar (for me an open bar wasn’t optional) I am DIY’ing where I can. This includes both of the favors - yes, we’re doing two one that is “me” and one that is “him.” Mine was easy, I made soap . I’ve been making soap a few years and have given it as gifts in the past so that was a no brainier. His favor was harder to come up with…we considered the trendy succulents because my fiancé is a plant addict and succulents are his favorite but we thought they would be hard to travel with for guests with many people leaving them behind or killing them immediately. So that idea was nixed.  I was looking online for ideas with could replicate with a DIY and found some custom spice favors on Etsy that were really cute and we were thinking about ...

We set out to have a small, economical wedding...well that didn't exactly happen. I think we had a nice wedding which wasn't a fancy, black-tie soiree but also not cheap, it was mid-range. Simple but nice. I did several DIY projects which saved us a lot of money, we looked for deals where we could find them and negotiated where we could. We had two splurge items. The first was our venue, which was a little pricier than we'd originally planned on but also in some ways a good value because we could use the venue for the ceremony and reception, included with our catering costs. The catering wasn't cheap  but it also wasn't expensive and they were overall very flexible with our budget. The venue was also wired for sound so we skipped a DJ, which saved us around $800 based on the few quotes I got. The second was our photographer. Not only did we choose a full-time photographer who was really a professional (part-time semi-pro photographers seem to abound!) but we a...

For me, making the bouquets was the hardest part, it was very time consumming. I tried several different "stems." The floral wires and bamboo sticks (suggestions of what to use I'd seen online) were both really rigid, which I found made it hard to put them together and shape the flowers in the way I wanted. After some trial and error, I chose a main flower to put in the middle of the bouquet (a large one) and put that one on a bamboo stick (the kind used to make shish kabobs) and attach floral wire to all of the other flowers which I then wrapped around the main flower's "stem." If you are planning to do this, start at least a month before your wedding - it took FOREVER to make the bouquets and I only had mine, 3 bridesmaids, 1 flower girl and 1 toss. If you have a big wedding party, you will need help. Unfortunately none of my girls lived nearby and I did not ask any local friends because I wasn't aware that it was going to take up my entire life for ...

Let me say, this was my first time making boutineers and this is was the part I was the most worried about when DIY’ing my flowers for the wedding. I was comfortable doing it because my mom, who had done it before was going to help me but an issue arose close to our wedding and I ended up being on my own for flower making. So while I was concerned about it, I think it was possibly the easiest part, especially the boutineers, the bouquets on the other hand I wasn't worried about but they were a pain the rear! These are not the beautiful works of art you will find on pinterest but I would say they are as nice as a basic model from a florist. They are simple, in part, because my fiancé did not want a huge flower for himself, so I made his fairly small and then all the ones for the other men slightly smaller than his. Making the boutinners was really straight forward, I suggest you start with these because they are the easiest. Supplies needed: ·     ...

When planning our wedding, most of which we paid for ourselves, I felt it was really important to prioritize which items were important to us and warranted spending more of our budget on them and which didn't. For me, that was an open bar, a good photographer and making sure our friends & family could all come and have a good time (ie bigger guest list). So lots of fancy flowers weren't really a big priority, though I still wanted fresh flowers. I considered ordering flowers in bulk and DIY'ing the arrangements as I'm quite crafty but since I had zero experience in arranging flowers, let alone making boutonnieres and corsages, I decided that DIY with real flowers would add too much stress in the days before the wedding since they have to be made close to the wedding even when using the kits you can order online. I had budgeted $975 for flowers including bouquets (1 bride, 3 bridesmaid), boutonnieres (groom, 3 groomsmen, 3 dads, 1 grandpa, 2 ushers, 1 ring b...