OT - Redundancy & weddings - WWYD

I feel for you Redkezza. We are actually in your situation a bit further down the line though. To catch up, my H2B lost his job at the end of May aside from the wedding fund, we had enough to see us through until the end of September. It's nearly that time now and he's still not been able to find any work.

It really depends on when your wedding is and how you've approached budgeting for it. For example, we had a lump sum for our wedding, but were also relying on being able to save at least another £1500 in the last 10 months before the wedding - this of course hasn't happened as H2B cannot contribute anything at all to the savings fund, and my contributions are beginning to be hit as I'm having to pay for a lot of other stupid things for the two of us (e.g. MOT, household insurance, council tax etc). If your wedding is close, then the financial impact should the worse happen, and should you be out of work for a significant amount of time would be post wedding when presumably all of that stuff has already been paid for (FYI jobseekers is £62 week, shoud you need it, worth it if you are out of work as they will continue your NI payments on your behalf).

So, no one can really advise you - it depends how comfortable you are betting on possible outcomes, after all, none of this is definite yet, and even if it happened, the amount of time you would potentially be out of work is probably the length of a piece of string! Your financial risk temperament sounds close to mine so here's what we did although I still don't know if it all will work out alright, I still get sleepless nights from it...

We waited and set a deadline of 3 months. In that time we halted what we could on the wedding planning so that no decisions were made that we couldn't later go back on. With only 4 months until the wedding, and him having been out of work for 3, we decided to reduce the number of guests - this made a significant difference to our expenditure. It was a difficult decision to make (although I always wanted a smaller wedding anyway) and we're still awaiting the fall out of when some people realise they didn't make the list! In retrospect though, it's helped us to stop and reasses the wheels of the wedding machine which have a tendency to accelerate and gather additional baggage along the way and work out what was really important to us regarding the wedding. There are many ways to reduce the budget just by changing meal arrrangements, entertainment and drink.

I didn't mean this to be so long, but your post really reminded me of how I felt in May. Yes I'm still worried sometimes, and yes it is the worst possible timing ever but in my mind, I'm only getting married once and I don't want to look back and say "I wish I'd done that." Our wedding day will be special to us however we celebrate it and I suspect that when it comes, I won't want to change a thing.

HTH

Hi FVJ199

Thank you for sharing that with me, especially as it is such a personal subject, it really means a lot to know someone out there literally knows how it feels. We are extremely fortunate in that we have managed to save everything for the wedding (short of about £300 which will go through next month and before I find out) I think waiting for a few months is a good plan, it may mean we are scrabbling around for a few months to get everything done in time, but will be worth it to make a more balanced decision.

The really sad thing is I am not even so concerned about the money - I love my job so much I'm just lost at the thought of losing it! Maybe that it why I am jumping the gun here - just to distract myself!

Thanks again - I hope things sort themselves out for your H2B and I am sure you are right - your wedding will be wonderful!

xx