The Budget
Today we sat down to make our ‘official’ wedding budget. Every wedding book and website we’ve looked at says that the first and most important part of planning a wedding is the budget. How many dollars for the venue, how much for transportation, and what to spend on invitations. We’ve done a lot of research and feel like we set some pretty realistic numbers to paper. Many, many numbers. It makes sense that having a framework to work within makes it a more efficient and manageable planning process. You want to budget your money carefully so that it gets appropriated to the right item in the intended amount. So that the event goes just as you planned it and anticipated. So that you maximize its’ potential to work for you. Yeah, for all these reasons budgeting is very important.
That got me thinking, if budgeting is so important how come we only do it with money? Money is replaceable. There will always be more. Sure it’s necessary to survive and of course we want to remain financially stable and be able to purchase the things we want and need. Naturally we all want to have more of it. But reality is that the amount of money we have is not predetermined or limited. We can always get more. We can always get a promotion, a second job, downsize, invest, save. We’ll always have some amount of money. And it matters somewhat but it certainly isn’t everything. Not to me at least.
So why don’t we budget things that are much more limited? Why don’t we take such care to budget our time? Time is in short supply. We can’t get more and there’s no going back. It’s interesting that we don’t put such a premium on how we spend it, the choices we make, what that says about us.
I’m sitting here thinking it’s kind of funny that I’m willing to spend ‘x’ amount of dollars on a DJ and that’s set in stone for some reason but you’d never hear me say I’ll only spend 10 hours per precious year of my life angry or sad or scared. We never say “life is so short and so important that I promise to myself that I’m only budgeting 40 hours per week for work. The rest I want to spend with my cherished loved ones.” We’d look at someone like they were crazy if they said “I’m not going to let this bother me right now. I’m choosing to be happy at this time because I’m only budgeted for 15 minutes of frustration per week and I want to save it for tomorrow’s conference call.” Maybe we should.
Now that everything I do has an impact on another person I care so much about I think I’m going to do a little time budgeting. In past years I won’t say I’ve ‘wasted’ time but going forward I’d like to be more aware of how I use my time to make sure I’m spending it the way I really want to. I want to be more conscious of how I spend my time, how we spend our time, and the decisions I make that take away time that would be better spent another way.
The wedding budget is complete. Time to work on the marriage budget.
