Life has a funny habit of throwing everything at you at once. After you’ve left home and finished your education, you will have a great ‘grace period’ where you get to enjoy your youth and freedom and focus on your career for a while. This is all fun and well for a while, but then suddenly you find yourself having to grow up all at once. Your partner wants to settle down, you aren’t getting any younger, and it’s time to start saving towards the future.
When you come to this realisation you’ll find you are quite suddenly hit with a number of different things you need to do. The most pressing of all? Buying a house and getting married.
But this is where things get tricky: how do you know which to do first? How do you afford both? And can you do both at the same time?
Which First
For many people the decision of what to do first will be a tough one. On the one hand, buying a house will offer you financial security whereas getting married will not. These days getting married tends to be a seriously expensive and extravagant event and can set you back majorly, making it difficult to get on with other plans such as buying a house. For that reason, you may think that buying the house first would make most sense.
On the other hand though, you will also find that you have some good reasons to get married first. That’s because moving house can take a long time and can also leave you without much money left over. This then means you’ll potentially have to put off getting married for a year or more if you want to move home first, and this can mean placing your dreams on hold. You may thus be tempted to just act fast and get married now…
How do you decide which to do first? Well that will depend partly on how eager you are to get married, on your financial situation and on what your partner thinks. These are the pros and cons though which will help you to decide a little more easily.
Doing both
Doing both at the same time of course is also an option, but then you are facing two huge expenses as well as two large logistical challenges which you’re likely to find are rather challenging to overcome.
There are things you can do though to make both a little easier. The first is to stagger what you do – start buying the house first and put money away gradually in the meantime for your wedding. This makes the most sense as the wedding will take longer to plan and to put into action.
Likewise you can save money by finding an affordable mortgage, by buying things on finance for your wedding where possible, and by doing things more cheaply in your wedding when you can too. An easy tip that will make a huge difference? Get married on a Wednesday – your family and friends can afford to take two days off work and you’ll save thousands as a result.
