My fiance and I live in Missouri, where short of Supreme Court intervention there's zero hope of gay marriage being legal in the forseeable future. We've gotten tired of saying "someday we'll have a ceremony" and hearing all our friends tell us we should just go for it and stop waiting (we've been together 7 years already), so we've set a date for next year and are excitedly planning. At some point we're open to going to another state and getting hitched for real, but we haven't wanted to go out of our way to do so since it won't make any difference whatsoever back here at home. We were actually going to go down to DC and do it the last time we visited her parents in NJ, but the logistics didn't work out.
However, it's a good possibility that in the very near future I could get a promotion that comes with a significant raise. I'm certainly not going to make any new plans before I know for sure, but my family has raised the question of whether or not more income would change our wedding plans.
We don't want to increase our actual wedding budget very much because the ceremony and reception plans we've made are just fine and don't need to be made extravagant for no reason. We haven't been planning much of a honeymoon, though, (we've been thinking maybe a quick trip to Vegas at the most) and we both agree that if I get the promotion we should ramp up our honeymoon plans, since we've never really had the chance to just travel for fun. And it opens the possibility of taking time out to elope somewhere within a few days of our ceremony. We could either get married in NY and visit her family (her extended family won't be able to travel to our ceremony) on our way to somewhre more exciting, or honeymoon somewhere in a state that recognizes gay marriage, or just not even bother with a legal marriage and just go someplace fun.
If our budget changes, do you all think it's worth it to bother getting married legally in conjunction with the wedding we've already planned, or should we just wait until we visit her parents again (which probably won't be for at least another year)?