Once upon a time after a breakup, Diana Kelly started a wedding fund. It may seem counterintuitive—most people have a partner in mind when they start planning a wedding—but for Kelly it was a way of declaring her intention of finding a life partner and eventually getting married.
So with her goal in mind, Kelly, a freelance writer, began contributing $100 each month to a savings account, separate from her other accounts, which she labeled “Future Wedding.”
“I believed that if I kept throwing money in there, the universe would help me out and I’d meet someone,” Kelly says.
While $100 per month might not seem like a huge sum, at the time Kelly was living on her own in notoriously expensive Manhattan. “Putting $100 aside each month was significant,” she says. To find the money, she created and stuck to a strict dining-out and bar budget. Kelly also had the wedding fund money automatically transferred to her savings account each month. “Having that money in a separate account meant I could avoid the impulse to spend it on something else,” she says.
In addition to her monthly deposits, Kelly directed any surplus funds to her wedding stash—such as money she earned from selling items on eBay or working extra writing assignments. And when she realized her new relationship was getting serious, she tossed a little more into the account.
Just three years later, in the spring of 2017, Kelly had accumulated $10,000 in her wedding account—a fact she didn’t share with her boyfriend until they got engaged that summer. Once they started hashing out wedding plans, she spilled the beans.
“He was surprised and delighted, because he’d been saving up for a ring and hadn’t had a chance to put money aside for the wedding,” she says.
But it turns out Kelly wasn’t the only one saving for her wedding—after she announced her engagement, her parents confessed they’d also set money aside for the event. “Growing up, my parents were always budgeting and making small sacrifices to be able to afford longer term goals.”
Now that she’s married, Kelly’s new savings goals are twofold—she’s putting aside money to upgrade her home office, and she and her husband are saving for a house. And yes—they’re using the same technique that got Kelly to her wedding goal.
Lynn Shattuck is a writer living in Maine. Her work has recently appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Bankrate and Fabric.com.