Navigating Financial Stress in Catholic Wedding Planning

ANGELA MIKRUT

Almost every decision you make regarding your wedding will affect the overall cost. For most couples, these expenses can significantly contribute to the feeling of stress leading up to the big day. 

PHOTOGRAPHY: Janisse Valenzuela Photography

Wedding planning and decision-making often come with certain expectations about what a wedding should have. You may feel pressured to include certain details or make a particular decision to appease those societal expectations. 

Not everyone is in the place to throw thousands of dollars at their wedding day without it causing some amount of stress. When making these decisions as an engaged couple it’s important to keep some things in mind when considering your expectations and your budget.

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Determine your priorities

First list out the most important details to you and your fiancé. What do you truly want to  include in your wedding day? Go from here and put your money first towards the decisions most important to you.

Continuously remind yourself why you are making all these decisions and go back to your priorities to see if your decisions are lining up with what you initially said was the most important to you as a couple.

Invite the Lord into the process

In prayer, ask the Lord to help guide your decision-making and ask Him to reveal what you need. Ask Him to help you not get caught up in society’s idea of the “perfect” wedding but rather, keep you focused on the reality of the sacrament you will soon experience.  

Prepare yourself that you can’t have it all

If you want to stick to your proposed budget, remind yourself that you can’t do and have everything you gush over on Pinterest or seen done by another couple. 

Appreciate the beautiful weddings you see but remind yourself that your wedding doesn’t have to look like someone else’s, and it will be even more beautiful if you come to terms with this and get excited about the things you do get to implement.

Related: Planning your dream wedding without breaking the bank

Whether you receive financial help for your wedding or not, weddings can be extremely expensive for just one day. A wedding celebration is of course deserving, but at what point does the focus on money and expensive details lead the couple and even the guests away from the reality of the sacrament?

Look to Saint John Chrysostom and keep his words from On Marriage and Family Life close to you as you make financial decisions regarding your wedding, “Money is everything now, and so everything has become corrupted and ruined, because we are possessed by this passion for money.” 

Don’t allow yourself to fall into the trap of consumerism. The value of your wedding isn’t determined by the size of your budget.

Aim to keep the first breath of your marriage pure, so that when you are preparing to walk down the aisle, you have a clear conscience about all the money that was put into your wedding day. 

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About the Author: Angela loves creative work, especially photography, and has a special place in her heart for JPII. She's engaged and getting married in late December.

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Bringing God into Finances and Fertility

BRIDGET BUSACKER

Finances can often be a source of frequent conversation and tension in marriage. When upholding marriage as free, total, faithful and fruitful, Catholic marriage—like Natural Family Planning (NFP)—requires an openness to the possibility of life.

We have to remember that, first and foremost, the Catholic Church’s teachings on marriage and family life are openness to life, not controlling life. NFP is a gift, a tool, to help couples learn and navigate the woman’s body when it comes to discerning family life.

PHOTOGRAPHY: DESIGNS BY JESSINA

In the context of costs, budgets and financial planning, anticipating the cost of a child can bring about a lot of fear. And frankly, the last thing you want to do in a moment of intimacy is think about money. 

If we purely live our married life out of worry and physical concern, then it is calculated and feels icky; we are not meant to live in the black-and-white of one reality. NFP requires us to live in the tension of our faith: both the physical and spiritual realities of our marriage. It is just as important to learn our marriage in its sacramentality as well as in its physical nature. 

On one end of the black-and-white spectrum, it is important to have all the finances associated with raising a child saved before beginning such an exhausting and financially treacherous journey. On the other end, it’s assumed that babies will come and you must be prepared to say yes to every fertile opportunity. Unlike these messages from the world, holy, Catholic marriages pursue the middle ground of these poles. 

Finances are an important topic for a couple to discuss because there are obvious realities: where to live, spending habits, mortgages, phone bills, diapers, etc. Without our faith, it can become very calculated and lacking in the bigger vision of our goal: Heaven. 

NFP requires conversation and discernment because there’s no way to skip the fertile phase each month. Avoiding sex during the fertile period of a woman’s cycle in order to avoid pregnancy requires prayerful discernment and conversation between husband and wife. This is much more challenging than using a form of physical birth control and talking about “what if” at a convenient time. We are challenged to remember that life is a gift and we have the opportunity to say “yes” to the adventure of raising a child and saying “yes” to generations. 

Planning and discernment are integral to the vocation to marriage; we can’t deny one or the other. Balance is much harder to strive for than simply picking one way to live. 

At its core, our life should be lived through our faith. Faith is the basis of our existence. It allows us to choose adventure when the world may tell us we’re foolish to live without fear of tomorrow. Christ promises to look out for us and take care of us, so while we are, in fact, called to be prudent and responsible, he fills the voids from our shortcomings. 

Living in the tension between the physical and the spiritual life requires us to prepare and use our finances, to be open to the gift of children, and, ultimately, to trust God in the integrated whole. 

There is an undeniable relationship between finances and fertility. A peace of heart and mind is achieved when finances and fertility are bound together with faith. 

God has a plan for you and he desires you to grow in relationship with him and your spouse. God will never give you something you can’t handle, including a child. It is a blessing to welcome life into the world. A blessing doesn’t mean there won’t be challenges or hardships, but it means that the gift outweighs the cost. 

Anything worth doing is worth fighting for.

There will be hard conversations and budgeting choices you have to make. There will be a learning curve as you begin to navigate NFP for the first time (or for the first time with a spouse). 

Building collaboration and intimacy in your marriage is a practice that, when offered to God, is affirmed with grace. Where there is struggle, there is growth; NFP certainly has its peaks and valleys, but it is worth it.

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About the Author: Bridget Busacker is a public health communications professional and founder of Managing Your Fertility, a one-stop shop for NFP/FABM resources for women and couples. She is married to her wonderful husband, David, and together they have a sweet daughter.

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