Have you ever wondered how people pay for their weddings? Do parents have a secret stash of wedding money ready to be dispensed when their kids finally get engaged? Do couples conjure up the money by wriggling their nose [if that’s the case, can you wriggle me up some cash to cover my student loans]? Where are people getting all this wedding cash from?

I will admit that, along with researching the weddening, I have also quietly been setting money aside to cover the costs of our blessed event. My main motivation for saving the money before our engagement was that I didn’t want to worry about where we were going to get the money to pay for our wedding. Since my original estimated budget was on the more elaborate side, I figured it would be smart to begin saving money now. That way we can slowly put aside small amounts of money whenever we had extra and would hopefully have the majority of it by the time we were engaged. I have since readjusted the budget and eliminated the parental contributions because I didn’t want to put any extra pressure on our parents to contribute. If they want to contribute, cool, but I don’t want them to feel compelled to. In fact, I’m not expecting them to.

And I will admit a small part of it was also because I wanted us to retain complete creative control over the planning. I’ve seen too many friends battle against their parents because they didn’t like some of the options their parents were offering but since they had accepted their money, they felt compelled to follow through. I did not want to lose the essence and soul of our wedding day in the swirl of parental obligations and what they felt was “wedding appropriate.”

I know that some people build in extra time to save money for the wedding by extending their engagement period but with a super short engagement, that’s not an option for us, at least, not unless we don’t want to eat or pay rent or something. And I refuse to take out loans. I don’t believe in taking out loans for one day; especially not with student loans breathing down my back! I really like knowing that we’ll be able to essentially pay for our wedding in cash and be done [though I will put everything on a credit card for the purchasing protection and rewards points, I intend to pay of the bill in full each month]. At this juncture, we have roughly about 64% of my proposed wedding budget saved up. I really hope we’ll be able to save up the rest of it before we get married.

Okay, another disclosure: is it weird that part of me hopes he waits to propose until after we have the money, or at least close to it? When I went through that brief episode of the –itis last month, I may have gotten a little freaked out because I didn’t have all of the money saved up yet. Crazy, I know.

Already having a budget in mind helps with the wedding research because I can get a good idea of what we’ll be able to afford with our money. Though I’m still trying to figure out the cash allocations for each budgeted item but it’s hard to fine tune. I keep going over our budget! I need to find a good budget calculator. Does anyone know of one besides The Knot and Brides.com?