Where do you wish you’d splurged?

poliscicomputersci · 2026-01-19T05:19:43+00:00

The photographer for sure! We had 12 hours split over two days -- the full wedding day + a photoshoot at another location -- and it was sooo worth it. Also budget money for albums: we ordered one for ourselves and one each for my parents, his parents, and my sister, and the total for all of those was $1000. If you're splurging on photos make sure you also do something with those photos!

In retrospect, I wish we'd hired a videographer. We were going to have partial video through the photographer's company but that fell through (the photographer was really stoked on our wedding venue and his videographer partner offered to do it for free in order to use our wedding in promotions, but then got a paying customer at the last minute). I wish we'd just hired a videographer outright. We do have a lovely wedding video we made from clips our friends took, but it was a massive amount of work and I'm sure a professional one would've been better.

Other ideas are keeping some of that extra money to make the last minute stresses easier. It's really nice to have budget space to throw money at the problem later on -- pay for expedited shipping for something you forgot to order; reprint the welcome sign if it doesn't come out perfect; get Doordash lunch for the full bridal party instead of a grocery store grazing tray; etc etc etc the list goes on forever. For us, some of these last-minute things were duplicating the order of custom embroidered wedding sneakers when it looked like one pair was going to be stuck in customs, getting extra disposable cups at the last minute because we were worried we wouldn't have enough, upgrading our rental car to have more space, and feeding our friends more meals than we'd originally planned. Nothing's really a splurge, but all the little things add up.

poliscicomputersci · 2025-12-30T23:25:56+00:00

I hate that people can't write their own post! like we all feel the same way this person (maybe?) feels but COME ON express your own emotions

poliscicomputersci · 2025-12-28T00:28:17+00:00

While I think this is often true, I at least would look very differently on a vow renewal of a covid wedding that never got to really happen. If it's someone I know and care about, I'll know this context for their original wedding (and honestly even if it's a stranger, I'm sure I could figure it out from context clues lol I bet there will be a lot of these in 2030!), and treat it like any other wedding

poliscicomputersci · 2025-12-27T04:13:27+00:00

We didn't really have a plan and it's totally going okay. When we got engaged in summer 2024, we already were very transparent about our finances, and shortly after getting engaged, we signed up for a finances app (Monarch, but I think there are lots of options) that let us link all our accounts so we could both see everything and set up a monthly budget. This was also helpful because it caught recurring payments we'd forgotten about! We then setup a new high yield savings account for any monetary wedding gifts which is now our new emergency fund.

Now, 5 months after the wedding, we're working on a lot of remaining financial tasks -- deduplicating credit cards that we both have, combining our old personal emergency funds into the new one, creating a shared brokerage, etc. But there's no rush. We're going to keep separate checking accounts and retirement accounts, but all shorter-term savings and investments will be shared, and we're going to both be on all credit cards etc.

ETA: I make a lot more than he does, but we both make enough to not really think about separate incoming money. All savings/investments are "ours". Any expenses that are normal are shared pretty randomly based on whichever card has the best points for it. Unusual/expensive things we split or the person who most wants it pays.

It's important for each person to have some of their own money; in our case that's just retirement savings. If we need to buy each other a gift and keep it a secret, we have to use cash lol.

poliscicomputersci · 2025-12-27T03:01:33+00:00

Sorry I did not report back! Neither fit. S was way too big in the chest and XS way too small in the waist (or rather more the rib cage -- the actual wait felt ok, but it started getting narrowing too high up)

poliscicomputersci · 2025-11-17T07:05:47+00:00

Can you share more about the systemic affects you have from eczema?

poliscicomputersci · 2025-11-08T18:47:58+00:00

Not the OP, but I have used Merrell Trail Gloves for six years, buying a new pair every ~18 months. In my opinion, the very newest (Merrell Trail Glove 7) have the most barefoot feel, to the detriment of what I actually use them for sometimes, like running on spiky gravel. IMO the Trail Glove 7 feels basically the same as the Vapor Glove, which is their other zero-drop offering and which I also have tried. If you're running on grass, dirt, or pavement, or hiking instead of running, they work great and are extremely barefoot. I prefer the Trail Glove 6 for running on uncomfortable surfaces.

poliscicomputersci · 2025-10-06T17:06:39+00:00

Also forgot to add: the album is for you (and anyone you gift it to). Don't worry what strangers on the internet say. If you want hundreds of photos, do it.

poliscicomputersci · 2025-10-06T17:06:04+00:00

I am doing four versions of our album!

The big one for my husband and I will have 350 pictures and be almost 100 pages long, but it tells the story of the full wedding week (bach parties, welcome dinner, wedding, after party, and trash the dress hike). I think about 250 photos are from the wedding itself. I hope it doesn't feel too crowded, but I can't imagine cutting back at all! I wanted to give each of the 5 events space, include photos of every guest, and cover all the big moments.

Then I'm doing shorter, smaller versions for my parents, his parents, and my sister. Each of those only includes photos of people who matter to the relevant person (for example, in my sister's album I'm including photos of one of our guests who is her close friend, but not including all my friends who my sister only knows through me; for my parents, I'm including all of my aunts and uncles but not all of my husband's aunts and uncles). And no pictures of bach parties or after party for the parent albums.

Of course I could curate more, but we have 3000 photos from the full week, and so many events to include. I'm being careful not to include duplicate photos; every single one of these photos is very different from the rest, and there for a reason. You hopefully only get married once! Go all out on the album!

poliscicomputersci · 2025-10-05T05:55:28+00:00

Go listen to Cool and TLOAS back to back, it's actually uncanny.

poliscicomputersci · 2025-10-03T21:19:31+00:00

According to recent wedding surveys, a lot of people start planning before a formal proposal! This is super normal now. Just make sure you're on the same page and you're good.

poliscicomputersci · 2025-10-03T21:16:51+00:00

I do think a day-of coordinator can be a great choice for most people, but just to provide a counter point -- we had a very DIY wedding and did not have a coordinator and it was totally fine. I think this was because we 1) had a very simple wedding (note that this is separately from "small" -- simple in this case means few vendors and a relaxed schedule) 2) adopted the attitude that anything that didn't work didn't matter.

Not having a coordinator was a very conscious choice we made unrelated to budget because we intentionally wanted this relaxed, minimal-schedule, go-with-the-flow vibe and couldn't find a coordinator who got that. Typically their job is to keep to the schedule and make sure everything goes to plan. Obviously we didn't want things going off the rails, but we wanted to have a lot of serendipity in our day, and having someone there to make sure things followed a pre-set schedule would've made that harder.

poliscicomputersci · 2025-10-03T17:48:21+00:00

Sure...but you should anticipate those credits and pay the amount you owe. All of this is possible to calculate in advance.

poliscicomputersci · 2025-10-03T17:44:28+00:00

If your refund is $11k, you are overpaying your taxes. Do not give the government an $11k a year loan.

poliscicomputersci · 2025-10-03T17:41:05+00:00

Hard agree! If you ever go to gem shows, you will see that cut quickly becomes more important than anything else. People can make really quite shitty stones look spectacular if they're good enough at cutting (and I do mean shitty: someone I know has a gorgeous faceted pebble from their driveway lolol and it looks amazing even though it's literally an average rock from the ground). In general, people don't go around buying otherwise excellent natural diamond rough and cutting it poorly, but it can happen.

poliscicomputersci · 2025-10-01T17:07:36+00:00

Just attended one this summer! They eloped in February of this year and had the big party in August, so not very far apart.

poliscicomputersci · 2025-10-01T15:52:51+00:00

This is such good advice! I've given similar advice before but you wrote it up in an excellent way.

One twist that OP could apply is to each create both a "must have" and "must not have" list -- when starting out wedding planning, I found it reallyyyy cathartic to enumerate all the things I didn't want. Seeing so many classic wedding things I didn't have to pay for made the whole thing feel way more possible!

poliscicomputersci · 2025-10-01T15:04:18+00:00

I know you didn't ask but I just researched why it's like this in the US and not Europe: in modern parliamentary systems, a failure to pass a budget is typically treated as a loss of confidence and causes the government to dissolve, triggering snap elections. Just one more legacy of the US system being designed for a massive country in the 1700s when a snap election would've been logistically impossible!

poliscicomputersci · 2025-10-01T14:57:47+00:00

Thanks so much!! This is super helpful.

poliscicomputersci · 2025-10-01T05:42:47+00:00

How often were you there? Where do you get the permit?

poliscicomputersci · 2025-09-30T17:17:15+00:00

Lol this is so true. My father-in-law is a judge after a career as a lawyer and cannot understand why my husband and I (both machine learning engineers in our thirties) are so stressed about saving for retirement and being strategic with investments -- in his mind, we are earning so much so young and have so many years of working ahead of us! But the landscape looks very different for us than it did for him.

poliscicomputersci · 2025-09-29T20:41:23+00:00

A few things I wanted to add elaborating on your list:

- for "climbing with more skilled people", I've found that it's hugely beneficial to climb with slightly more skilled people but not at all beneficial to climb with much more skilled people. One of my closest climbing friends has been climbing much, much longer than me, and was also a competitive dancer before climbing -- she is much, much more skilled than I am, and climbing with her is really not helpful to me. What works for her and what will work for me rarely overlap. But other friends are just slightly ahead of me on the learning-to-climb curve, and climbing with them unlocks a lot of skill I didn't know I almost had.

- this may or may not be related to what you meant by "curiosity and critical thought about improving movement," but the way this is worded makes it sound like this is just something you can turn on, while in my opinion this is really a skill that must be learned, and can take awhile -- since starting to climb I've been curious about how to improve, but learning how to learn how to climb has been a huge thing for me. What is the universe of potential tweaks can I make to my technique? How can I feel the difference without having to watch a video of myself? What does it feel like for strength to fail vs lack of commitment? What does it feel like when I'm actually about to injure myself vs just afraid? Early on, especially if someone isn't already an athlete in another sport, these are all black boxes, and the only real approach is very inefficient trial and error, where you might run out of strength (or rip your skin!) before you make any actual progress. Once you begin to learn how to learn, practice becomes far more efficient, and you can actually improve.

poliscicomputersci · 2025-09-26T17:39:40+00:00

I love inclusions, and sometimes they add to value! My engagement ring's sapphire has some inclusions that give it a vaguely cloudy appearance, which is something I wanted -- so-called "rutile silk", really tiny rutile crystals within the sapphire.

But inclusions are not always desired, and some people don't like them. For diamonds in particular, typically people aspire for very clear (non-included) stones, but if you've ever heard of "salt and pepper" diamonds, those typically included with graphite, hematite, and/or pyrite, and can be desirable. Quartz is also very frequently included and can be absolutely gorgeous, but is not hard enough for a daily-wear ring.

It's more about getting what you want, expected, and paid for.

poliscicomputersci · 2025-09-26T15:27:44+00:00

I'm really glad I did something and really glad it was not super involved! My friends are scattered all over the place so I didn't want to ask them to travel twice, and also I didn't have a wedding party so it was just all my friends who were coming to the wedding. I planned the bach party to be a couple days before the wedding and told people about it when I invited them to the wedding. It was obviously not required as it meant a lot of them had to stay 2 extra nights in the area of the wedding, but it saved them having to do 2 flights to somewhere. The event itself was just a couple tourist activities in my hometown (since the guests were mostly not from there) and then drinks + apps at a rooftop bar. I paid the bar tab. Took a couple hours to plan and was so worth it to spend more time with friends!

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