The Engagement-Period Stuff Freeze
Here’s something no one tells you about getting engaged: your engagement is a period of several months where you cannot, in good conscience, buy any home goods for yourself.
You’ve got this gift registry, and after much suffering you’ve put on that list every single small kitchen appliance and home linen and handheld power tool you can possibly imagine—and some you can’t. ["What is a garlic wheel?" "$10.99." "Add it!"] You’ve theoretically got this whole bounty of home goods coming to you. So buying anything you could register for before the wedding feels self-defeating.
And there’s the small(ish?) matter of all the money you’ve set aside for the wedding—it tends to leave the “new vacuum” fund a little shrunken.
If I were an optimist, I’d talk about how your engagement is a wonderful time for your home goods to break because replacements are on their way in the form of wedding presents. But I am a big old grump, so when our vacuum started to suck in the wrong sense of the word, I thought, “Well now what am I supposed to do until my wedding? Haul our living room rug out to the front porch and beat the cat hair off with a wooden stick?” Puh-lease.
And then there are the things you don’t even remotely need, but want, NOW. Collin decided he couldn’t wait until July for a pasta machine. I lamented losing an item from our registry, but got over it the first time he made fresh lasagna noodles (YUM!). But when he started to buy pasta-making accessories that I’d put on the registry, I had to draw the line. “If my Aunt Kathy can’t buy us a gnocchi board she might not come to the wedding in protest!” “Robin, you’re being irrational.” “I’M being irrational!? You bought a pasta machine six months before our wedding! That’s like if I had bought myself a diamond ring a week before you proposed!”
In the wake of the Pasta Machine Incident, Collin got on board with the Stuff Freeze. Sort of. The compromise we’ve worked out is to patch up what we can (buying a new filter for our vacuum cleaner to give it a few months more “effectiveness”) and to buy cheap temporary place-holders for the new stuff we can’t wait for. Like when we got tired of bickering over Collin’s running clothes getting mixed in with my dry-clean-only sweaters, we ordered me a separate laundry basket, a little plastic number that ran us less than $3. When it arrived we found out it was comically small, but it will hold (a tiny amount of laundry) until July. And we can leave our luxurious $30 hampers on the registry. Everyone wins!
So an unexpected side-effect of the Engagement Period Stuff Freeze is that it is good training for broke-ass living, even when there isn’t a wedding in the picture. Isn’t it ironic that expecting dozens of gifts is helping cure us of our irrepressible American consumerism? At least Morrisette-onic?
Have you suffered from the frustrations of the Stuff Freeze since getting engaged? Do you have any other strategies for hanging in there until that glorious day when UPS shows up on your doorstep with a stand mixer? Is this the easiest problem that comes about from planning a wedding?
-Robin
There has definitely been a Stuff Freeze here. Which is good, because we can't really afford more "stuff" while we're both in school and trying to put together a wedding. So the only things we're buying for ourselves are camping gear and movies, which were not really available to register for at the places we registered.
Annoying to wait for Things we Really need/want. Like a basting brush, or a new alarm clock.
No stuff freeze for us, but we solved that problem by not registering. Unfortunately, the stuff hasn't exactly been showing up on our doorstep without the freeze, either.
My concern is less with forcing myself not to buy home goods (I'm patient about registries), and far more with having to hold off on budgeting for things we like that have nothing to do with building the nest, so to speak.
Case in point – FH and I are concert fiends, and I love DJ gear and audio recording equipment. I really want a decent external sound card, parts to fix my turntables, and a new laptop so I can record the songs I'm sort of working on. Before the serious wedding planning went under way, I had planned on budgeting for all this by now. But with wedding planning comes financial planning (i.e. paying off my debts beforehand so my credit score doesn't become a liability for my more responsible FH).
Our Stuff Freeze is more about our budgets for non-wedding related items (in my case audio gear, in his case concert tickets) being used for stuff like invitations and bridal jewelry. How do you deal with having to wait to get back to the hobbies and passions that make you who you are, without spending a dime or compromising your personalities in favor of the trappings that responsible married couples supposedly want? Especially when Guitar Center and Ticketmaster don't have wedding registries?
For now, I rely on my analog synthesizer and free downloads for my pokey old Mac to keep me going.
I have definitely been going through that, but with dresses in place of music stuff. Which makes me feel pretty shallow!
Oh good, there's a name for it! We were literally just laughing maniacally about how after 3 years of living together we've never bought a decent potholder (still using ones I made in home ec in 9th grade), and now we shouldn't cause we should put it on the registry. Add that to ALL the things that have broken in the last 6 months, and we actually do need home goods even though we're not exactly straight out of college over here.
This has been very hard for me. Two months after we got engaged we moved into an apartment together. This is our first real apartment, since moving out of our parents house, so neither of us had a lot of furniture, accessories,etc. for the home. Add to this that we are having a two year engagement, so we couldn't go two years without buying the basics. So we have spent a bit of money, but have not bought anything we truly do not need at the given moment. I am a big baker and everyday I want to go buy a kitchenaid mixer, but I tell myself NO, to wait! Its difficult!
Bah, that's not shallow. You should see how many ebay listings under "Mad Men-style dresses" I have to force myself not to look at.
We're having registry problems, but of a different kind. We've lived together for two years, and aren't getting married for another 18 months because we need the time to save up money.
Because we've been living together for a few years already, we have everything we really need. I can think of maybe 5 things we'd put on a registry. The problem is that we're broke, and what we really need is money, not a set of dishes.
Has anyone found a way to handle this tactfully? Or are most people more interested in stuff than cash?
We haven't got to building a registry yet, but what we have been doing is bargaining ourselves into being allowed things. For example, we are in desperate need of a dining table that seats more than two people. We decided to forgo our Easter Long Weekend trip and get a table instead. We also saw this fabulous painting that can't be part of a registry – it lives in a gallery a few hours' drive from our house – so we decided to skip take out and restaurant dinners for 5 weeks so we can get ourselves the painting.
It's working well so far. But I have banned buying new saucepans.