I really don't advocate paying for a wedding on credit or loans. It's a bad idea to start a marriage saddled in debt from a day's worth of fun and every time you look at the interest rate on your credit balance it will tarnish your wonderful memories from your happy day.
That said....I am a full believer that you should charge as many of your wedding costs to your credit card as you possible can, making SURE TO PAY IT OFF IN FULL EVERY MONTH. There are a number of good reasons for this:
1) Disputing charges. It's much easier to dispute charges if a wedding vendor doesn't fulfill the terms of the contract if you charge the expense. (Be sure to ask if the vendor charges a fee for a credit card payment. From my experience, these can range from 3-5% which can wind up being a significant amount for expenses like catering and rentals.)
2) Tracking expenses. If you can devote a credit card to wedding only expenses, you'll find it very easy to figure out how much money you are spending overall.
3) Rewards points. This is my favorite benefit to using a credit card. Try to find one with either a really good cash back rate or decent travel perks. Mr. 3 and I are going to use my rewards points to pay for our 10 day rental car on our honeymoon, our airport transfers, and a sunset cruise! Make sure to also check to see if your credit card offers any traveler benefits just for being a cardholder. I didn't discover until we started planning our honeymoon that Visa Signature offers free wine tastings at over 60 wineries in Sonoma County!
Have any tips? Send them our way!
We "charged" everything to our airline credit card, paying it off by the end of the week because our credit limit was so low. We ended up with so many points that we were able to get 3 or 4 roundtrip domestic flights for free out of it. And the credit card company saw that we were "big spenders" and raised our limit 3-fold by the third or fourth month of wedding payments!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment Abby! Good job on making your credit card work for you. That's smart planning!
ReplyDeleteMelinda: Abby's blog is a lot of fun. Check it out at http://trialanderrorcreativity.blogspot.com/. She has no fear when it comes to arts and crafts!
ReplyDelete