Colleen
Appearances
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
And the way that we managed that was by getting someone who is both our photographer and videographer and did a Black Friday deal in November. So we booked it really early because we wanted to get the best deal possible money wise so that we could keep putting the rest towards everything else. I am fully planning on using Costco sheet cake.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
Well, I'm gluten-free, so I will have to have a small gluten-free cake just for, you know, the cutting and me and my groom eating. But everybody else, I think, will like Costco. And Costco does flowers. And we're trying to be as economical as possible because we are fortunate to have help. And we're trying our best not to...
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
go past what they're offering because then we have to pay for whatever we go over. I recognize that's a reality for a lot of people, but we're trying to also save for a lot of other things, not just our wedding.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
The way that I was raised was with the understanding of if someone owns their own business, they set their prices. And that's what they've agreed to work for. So you don't tip. But if someone is an employee of a company, then someone else has set the prices and you tip them. So what I'm finding a lot in the vendor business is... People who we're hiring own their own businesses.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
But every piece of advice I'm getting is that you tip for like every single thing that you use for the wedding. So these two different pieces of advice of what I was raised believing about tipping culture and what I'm seeing all online are in direct contrast. And obviously, we're setting our budget for And the tipping will take us over, which I recognize.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
I want to make sure I'm being fair and recognizing people for their hard work. But I guess I just don't know what's okay.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
Yeah. So as I mentioned before, we have help from our family for paying for the wedding. And To make their brains a little bit easier, they went ahead and sent some of the money ahead of time just so that it's off their plate and onto ours. And so as we're paying for things and putting it on our credit card for points for airline travel, hopefully that'll... Love to hear that.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
Yeah, yeah, that's the goal. That we can just then pay ourselves back instead of having to go to them for each one. And so since I have this chunk of money ahead of time, right now it was just transferred straight into my checking account. But that feels like a I don't know if that's a silly place to just keep it in the meantime.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
Is it worth moving that into savings into a high yield savings account? I just don't want to make a silly move or not take advantage of this moment.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
Okay, great. The other question I had is sort of a combo question about etiquette and it affects our finance and our budget. As I mentioned before, we have two different venues. One is the church where we're getting married and one is the reception. We're having people stay close to the church.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
And we have arranged buses to take people from the church to the reception because we know that's like a 20-minute ride away. And if we want people to go to both, we need to provide transportation. And since it's a 20-minute ride away, we need to provide transportation back.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
But my question would be about asking people to get themselves to the church, which is half a mile, but it's in the heat in September and it's in heels. But we chose a place close to the church on purpose. Is it acceptable to ask people to get themselves to the church or do we need to add another segment of our buses and pay for people's transportation to the ceremony?
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
Okay, great. That saves me money. Yeah.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
Oh, so much better. Now I need to go back into my budgeting spreadsheet and add in the tips so that I won't have that sticker shock. So I can see now what I will expect. And I'll double check the language in my contracts because I didn't even think about that being like the restaurant already added gratuity, you know? Right. Yeah.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
Thank you. Congratulations to you and your partner too. Yes, congratulations to both of you and thank you for having us.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
Thank you so much, Sean. I'm excited to be here.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
So I work for a university out here in LA. I've been here for about two years. Before that, I was working in entertainment, but I made the switch to academics two years ago for a little more work-life balance, and it's been incredible. My fiance and I met three and a half-ish years ago. A typical dating app story. We met on Bumble, and I just knew he was special from the first date, so...
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
We are a little more complicated than like a lot of our friends because we're getting married. Our ceremony is in a church and then our reception is in a restaurant up the road, like 20 minute drive away. So we'll have our family in town for it. I'm from Texas. He's from Maryland. So a lot of our wedding is flying in. It's going to be a pretty big family event.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
But like all of our friends are in L.A. and our life is in L.A. where we met in L.A. And either way, a lot of the people are going to have to travel no matter where we had it. So we decided to have our wedding where we live.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
What we think we'll end up with is about 150.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
So we got engaged in August, September-ish last year. He proposed to me on our trip to Japan at the top of Mount Fuji. So romantic. At sunrise. It was great. Maybe we waited two weeks after we got engaged before we started planning, but it definitely happened a lot faster.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
September 12th.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
Yeah. Well, no, it's a little more than a year from our engagement, but a little less than a year from when we started planning.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
We are very fortunate. We have parental help from both sides. So we very quickly created the Google spreadsheet of tracking. Here's how much we're receiving. And we started with our fixed costs. Since we're getting married in a church, that's not a negotiable price. And I'm not willing to negotiate on not getting married in a church. So we knew that was going to cost X amount.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
And then there's an efficient fee and there's a premarital counseling fee as well. And then we looked at what was left, which luckily those things are not very big. But the venue was our first biggest cost. We wanted a place that had a lot of the chairs and tables and linens and glasses. And so we didn't have to individually price out all of that. So we found a place that does this whole package.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
And that was a huge part of our budget. So then from there, we've been trying to calculate budgets. well, what do we have left? And figuring out what my non-negotiables are and his non-negotiables, like I'm okay without a videographer, but my fiance is not. And so we had to bake that in.