Today’s guest post comes fromJesse Michelsen, who is a freelance writer and the creator of Personal Finance Firewall. He’s a married guy with a great wife, couple of baby girls and a passion for life.
Marriage, what a wonderful and joyous occasion! That is what brings me to guest post here. As you all know, Ninja and his honey are on their honeymoon, probably ruffling some sheets in Aruba right about now but there are a few other things that come with getting marriage.
I’m talking about GIFTS! It’s crazy, you get married and if that’s not awesome enough all by itself, people you know and some you probably don’t even know just give you all sorts of stuff! Toaster ovens, blenders, furniture, luggage..it can be just about anything. Not only that, if you aren’t living with your significant other when you get married, you get access to all their great stuff too! They move in with their better than yours TV and their make your friends jealous stereo system. It’s like having a bunch of birthdays all in one…but if you are unprepared to deal with this, you can get pretty wrapped up in the “stuff” and lose track of your financial goals.
What I’m talking about here is lifestyle inflation. Lifestyle inflation is when your situation changes making way for your lifestyle to get bigger and requiring more money to feed. All the wedding gifts, the wedding spending and even the honeymoon can open a floodgate if you aren’t disciplined and can’t get back into your frugal lifestyle after it’s all over.
How do you prepare before hand, and deal with the aftermath once the festivities are over?
Prepare yourself, it’s gonna be great!
Always register for wedding gifts. This is not for the reason you think. Yes, it makes it easy for friends and family to give you exactly what you WANT, but it also helps you take inventory of your stuff and see what you really need. When registering for gifts, don’t just go through the store and scan everything twice that is shiny or makes cool noises. Think about things you really need to get your life started on the right foot. When you get married you have some new needs to take care of, especially if you are moving into a new home together. Make a list of everything you will actually need and register for those things. It doesn’t hurt to register for some fun stuff afterward, but just keep your priorities in mind first.
Inventory his and hers. Before the wedding, make inventory of each others things. (do this together, it doesn’t look right if you are price tagging all your wife’s furniture before you get married…) Appliances, accessories, cars, bikes, things you both need and use all the time. There will always be duplicates. I even know a guy that has a hair straightener that I bet his girlfriend doesn’t know about..so go over everything. Decide on which things you want to keep and move into your new home. I know this is hard, with emotion and sentimentality, but try hard to decide if you will actually use a duplicate or not. Then, you can sell one or the other, before you even move in together so that it doesn’t get forgotten in the move, only to be found years later and thrown away. As a bonus here, the extra money can help pay for some of the wedding expenses.
Dealing with the Aftermath
Even after registering and cleaning out the duplicates from you life, some of your friends and family will get you something you already have. Prepare for this before hand. If you get duplicates of something you did register for, and they are identical, just return one. As for those that are not identical, or if you get something that you already had in your house, you have to make the decision of keeping the better one or profiting from its superiority.
Lifestyle inflation is really tricky to deal with because we all want nice things. As time goes by, you will accumulate so much extra stuff in your life, you will eventually have to upgrade to a bigger house just to accommodate all the junk and the problem will continue to snowball if unaddressed. But if you don’t actually use any of it, what’s the point.
Marriage is the start of the rest of your life; it’s best to start small and keep things under control from that point forward.
P.S. Good luck to you Ninja and the Mrs. You guys are off to a great start. You have had pre-marital counseling (which I wish everyone getting married would take, our countries divorce rate is embarrassing), you have had many discussions about your future with each other and you both have very similar goals. That is a recipe for success!
We were broke and a week out of college when we got married, so we appreciated everything we were given so much more than I think we would have otherwise. My only advice is to keep the bigger crockpot. Mr. BFS and I didn’t cook 5 years ago in our tiny apartment kitchen, but now we have our own house and have realized we should have kept the bigger of the two crockpots, lol.
I’d also make sure to truly thank all the gift givers – they don’t know how much you appreciated their generosity until you tell them. I thank everybody all the time since our kitchen was pretty much completely filled via gifts. 🙂 It also lead me to be a better gift giver myself.
Nice stuff breeds a craving for more nice stuff. The yearning to make a nice comfortable home like your parents. Only your parents took decades to gather nice stuff. Do you remember the stuff your parents owned when you were 3? Likely it was shabbier carpet, an older couch, a tv without a remote. When Dad accidentally knocked the kitchen tv off the shelf, it became a black-and-white tv, and wasn’t replaced until 10 years later. I remind myself of that when I look at my sub-par homemade curtains!
The above comment is so true! we just bought our first house and it’s pretty much empty. seriously. we have empty rooms. the furniture we do have is very college-esque.
it’s easy to look at your parents house and think that yours needs to look that way immediately…but i’m realizing that look takes YEARS to accomplish…and a ton of money!
i’d rather sit on my futon and stockpile our savings right now.
… or you can get married at 22 and just be happy that your friends were able to spring for a plane ticket since they sure can’t afford a gift on top of that…
We also still have a couple of rooms without furniture.
Inflation yes? But I would be more worried about things to come after that. Check this guy out, he called the crash back in 2008 and has been spot on with this for the last few years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn6kS4l2yFM
Thanks for all the comments on this, PDITF readers are awesome!
@BFS
absolutely! I am so thankful for my wife, who always makes sure to send out thank you cards to everyone, for everything we are given. I would never remember to do it..
@Kim and Lisa
Excellent points, I’m sure that looking at our parents, and other older couples is where the yearning for more stuff comes from. “They have such nice things, we can have nice things too!” but their income is probably much higher due to time and experience, we need to wait, save and not jump the gun or we will regret it.
@Nicole
We got married at 18/19 so I know what you mean. We had such a small ceremony, we didn’t have to worry about lifestyle inflation. We also didn’t have ANYTHING to begin with, so it was pretty much a fresh and bare start. Everything we got was appreciated to the max, and we used the heck out of everything.
[…] I look at the changes in our eating habits around the home and think, Oh no! We are suffering from lifestyle inflation, but then I realize that we were living well under our means for so long, and nutritionally, it […]
I’m thinking the bigger house syndrome must be the real killer. Nesting instincts!