Dunkin Donuts or a DJ?

A daily Dunkin Donuts trip for a year or a wedding disc jockey?   What would you choose?

Here is the quickest way to find out where your money goes and how you can save.

Not without a long story….

A few years ago my husband and I were preparing to get pre-approved for a home loan.  We had been at our condo for 12 years and outgrew the one bedroom place.  The house we were preparing to buy was my childhood home that my parents were selling to us. 

For a short time, my Dad was actually going to act as the “mortgage holder”.  We thought this was FANTASTIC, but then realized my Dad may be curious about our spending habits to ensure we could pay the mortgage.  So the process began.  We starting going through our spending habits.  Every single transaction.

I downloaded all the transactions on my debit card for a given year to date.  I exported everything to an Excel spreadsheet and HOLY CRAP, why didn’t I think of this 20 years ago?  Since we had a pattern of similar charges (grocery, gas, work cafe, fast food, etc.), they were easy to track. 

For shits and giggles, I filtered all transactions for Dunkin Donuts.  Ummm, it was $700 from January through September of that year.  YIKES!  Hubby and I were freaking out trying to come up with justification for THAT unnecessary expense.  Before we could get ourselves completely stressed out, my Dad told us that we would need to go through a bank for the mortgage.  It’s interesting how much you think you spend on a habit vs. what is really spent.

Needless to say, we IMMEDIATELY changed our frequent Dunkin Donuts trips.  The eye-opening part of it was that we truly didn’t even realize it was that out of control.  My husband was going to the drive-thru before work and so was I, both not realizing that the other was doing this nearly every day.  Then weekend time came and that meant a Dunks trip on either Saturday or Sunday morning for the fam.  In my defense, Dunks was literally a two second drive (Ok, ok, two minutes).  This does not mean that I wasn’t looking at my account online frequently.   I was and I’d see Dunkin Donuts charges.  I just chalked it up to “oh, geesh, we need to stop going to Dunks “, but never did anything about it.  UNTIL the DOWNLOAD DAY (as we refer to it).

SO, HERE IS MY POINT.  If we didn’t stop the Dunkin Donuts spending habit, the total would have been around $1,000 by year-end.  That, my friends, is the approximate price tag for a lot of wedding vendors.  The DJ, the florist, the baker (well, hopefully not THAT much), the photographer, the ceremony fee…whatever.

I recommend that you do the same thing.  Get access to all your spending for a year time frame.  If you do not have online banking access, go into the local branch and work with customer service.  Once you have the data, pick it apart in whatever way is easier for you.  So long as you are pinpointing where your money is going.  See if you can eliminate one of the unnecessary spending habits.  Figure out how much a week that spending habit is and deposit that same amount of money into a savings account for wedding funds only.  Better yet, set up an automatic withdrawal.

I highly recommend opening a Certificate of Deposit Account (CD).

If your wedding is a ways out, put chunks of money into a short-term certificate of deposit (CD) accounts.  There is variety of online CD accounts you can open with low minimum deposit and terms like 6 months or 1 year. 

Search around for the best rate with a minimum that will work for you.  Keep in mind that final payments are typically due 30 to 60 days before the wedding.  The great thing about a CD account is that once you deposit the money, you cannot withdraw it until the end (without penalty, anyway).  It’s the ultimate savings account.

Below is a great post to get you started.  There are some listed that have minimums under $1000 and 3, 6 & 12 month terms.

The below link is updated daily with the Best CD Rates.