Lulu Loves: Life

At the beginning of this month, Mark and I met with a financial planner to discuss our financial goals and the best way to achieve them and his sage advice had an effect on our spending immediately.

Since January 1st, 2011, we have gone out to eat TWICE (to local restaurants where we each got an entree and one alcoholic beverage, paid with a coupon and ended up spending only $20 for dinner). All other food has been prepared at home and neither of us have purchased a single non-essential item. We’ve paid our bills, bought groceries and filled up our gas tanks and THAT’S IT.

And surprisingly, we do not feel bored or frustrated with our new-found fiscal discipline. We’ve gone to friends’ houses several times, done snowshoeing and sledding and filled our evenings with business trips, gym workouts and delicious homemade dinners.

Also surprisingly, we found an extra $350 in our monthly income that was mysteriously disappearing previously and is now going towards paying down debt!

We are so thrilled about how gloriously not-painful this first month was and look forward to Month 2 of this financial experiment!

[Side note: We each have a tiny percentage of our paychecks deposited into our own personal accounts for fun, selfish purchases (or gifts for the other!). For example, I went out for $6 martinis with a girlfriend last week and used my “funny money”. Our funny money purchases don’t count towards our joint spending goals. This allows for a BIT more wiggle room and fun!]

Several months ago, Casey asked for a tutorial on how our wedding invitations came to be. I finally dug out the photos of the invitations (three months after our wedding!) so here we go.

In terms of cost, I was actually surprised by how much we’d spent. I’d initially budgeted $500 for our invitations without having any idea of how much invitations cost. We tried to be cost-conscious in the process but didn’t want to spare any details.

In terms of time, these took forever. I’m not kidding anybody though - I loved putting these together and didn’t mind the time factor at all.

Postage ($119) - Each envelope cost $.81 so in theory we should have spent around $90. I’m not sure how I ended up with an extra $30 worth of stamps. I was slightly picky at the post office with which stamps we used - the classic wedding stamp just wasn’t our style.

Vintage stamps for decoration ($9) - I bought these on eBay when we first got engaged, knowing I would use them for something, and I ended up first affixing the real postage, then glue-sticking the old stamps on for decoration. I confirmed with the post office that the vintage stamps wouldn’t prevent the invites from being sent properly and everyone ended up receiving theirs just fine.

Calligraphy ($0) - The pseudo-calligraphy was free, thanks to my artistic mama and her nice handwriting. It’s not true calligraphy but it’s better than regular hand-writing and, oh, FREE.

Return address labels ($0) - Jessica designed them in PowerPoint, then I made a couple changes and printed them on my home printer on ivory cardstock which I already had. I punched out the circles using a punch I’d already purchased for other wedding projects, then Mark and I glue-sticked them onto the backs of the envelopes. I had originally wanted to order custom return address labels but time simply ran out and we had to make-do.

Notice more vintage stamps sealing the belly band?

Vintage map envelope liners ($23) - These were hand-cut from two vintage atlases that I bought on eBay. Again, I purchased them early on and didn’t know exactly how I would use them. I made a template for the envelope liner by hand and then cut them all out using good old-fashioned scissors. Some were more perfectly cut than others and some had prettier map designs (this is a particularly bad one - the good ones went to our guests!). I glue-sticked them all into the envelopes by hand.

First of all, my MS Paint skillz ROCK.

Envelopes, pocketfolds, invitations, RSVP card, directions card, details card, custom map, belly bands ($593) - These were all designed by Wenda of Tucci Paper Co. I initially wanted my step-sister to design the invitations for free but with a toddler and a newborn, she didn’t exactly have the free time to make things to my liking.

We didn’t want to spend the money, but I started trolling Etsy anyway for wedding invitations. Most designers have Etsy shops with samples of their work but will customize anything you want. I found a handful of artists I liked, made an Excel matrix to compare levels of liking, price per invite, etc, etc and decided on Wenda.

I loved her work but in the end wasn’t completely satisfied with her service. She didn’t get back to my emails in a timely manner and got the invitations to me nearly a week late after I reminded her my payment had been sitting in her account for a week. Everything ended up turning out just fine and we were pleased with both the quality and design of the invitations.

Misc supplies: glue sticks ($3), tape tabs ($2) 

The total came to $750 for 110 invites or $6.81/invitation, not including, of course, my many (MANY) hours spent putting the invitations together. And here is the final invitation suite:

We received SO MANY compliments on our invitations and they truly were my labor of love. I’m glad we spent the time and money on them and if you don’t have a grand and then some to spend on a custom letterpress suite, I totally recommend going this route and I can almost guarantee they’ll be much more impressive!