I've been so confused and at a total loss of what to do lately. This might be long, so I apologize in advance.
My FI and I have been engaged for 3 years now. Long story short....we got engaged in January 2012 when we were living in Michigan. 3 months later, we moved to Arizona for FI's job. Skip to 1.5 years later in Sept 2013, we moved to North Carolina for FI's job again. We are still in the same place.
Because of moving a few times, as well as the fact that we were VERY financially irresponsible for about 3 years, we managed to accumulate a ton of debt. We stopped spending and carried the balances for 2 years, then April 2014 I made a budget and we have been trying to heavily pay everything off. I like the idea of starting our marriage debt free.
My issue....is that I am sick of waiting, I just want to be married to him!! I don't want to wait any longer. We have a little in savings that I set aside before, and by messing with my budget and putting only minimums towards our debt for the next couple months, we can manage to have $6500 saved for a wedding by August of this year. I thought this was great, as we were hoping to go up to Michigan around then for a short visit.
Our original guest list was around 140 people. We managed to cut it down to about 95 people. I thought of doing a brunch reception instead of dinner, using an ipod instead of a DJ, and checking out restaurants instead of an actual banquet hall/venue. Restaurants are already decorated, so I could add a little touch and save on decorations as well. I presented this idea to my mom (she or my aunt were going to scope a few places out & skype me while getting tours), and she basically told me that I was "being cheap, this is one of the biggest days of your life. Decorating and putting ideas together is one of the most fun parts and you're just being cheap!" She also yelled at me when I scaled back on our guest list, saying "these are all good people, they deserve to be there, they helped me through a very tough time!" (they were mostly previous co-workers of hers that I have not seen in at least 10 years).
I'm getting frustrated with trying to figure this out, and I am sick of everyone asking us if we ever are going to get there, why aren't we married yet, what could be taking this long, do we have cold feet?, what was the point in getting engaged, blah blah blah.
So I guess what I'm asking is, if you were in my shoes, what would you do?? Would you try to plan a wedding for August on a small budget then continue paying debt after and just ignore what everyone says until then, or would you bite the bullet to pay off debt first and forget planning until that is taken care of?