How to Fund Your Dream Honeymoon

Colors, venue, food, photographer, center pieces, seating arrangements, guest book, cake…you don’t realize how many decisions there are to planning a wedding until you are in the thick of it. My husband and I knew we wanted a fall wedding, so when we got engaged we had approximately three and a half months to plan our dream wedding. After a few weeks, all the details were constantly swimming through our heads and we were swept up into a planning frenzy. Once the location was booked, the rest of the details started to fall into place, and I started to prioritize. I made list after list and sent email after email. Some days I felt I was on top of things and was not worried….other days I reconsidered the idea of eloping, just to avoid all the details. A word of advice to anyone planning a wedding – you will never feel prepared, and you will forget something. It’s inevitable; something will get over looked. For us, we didn’t think about a cake cutter or server and ended up using an eight inch long knife with a wooden handle that was found at the last minute in my grandparent’s motorhome. So, try not to sweat it too much. At the end of the day, we were still married, and we still got to cut and eat our cake.

From the get go, we wanted our honeymoon to be a getaway that would help us relax and unwind from all the planning. Our adventurous spirits wanted to go somewhere we had never been before. We wanted to explore new terrain and cuisine, but we were also working on a limited budget. We were originally thinking of going to the beach. After a hectic couple months of wedding planning, the idea of relaxing on a beach for a week or two sounded like the ideal way to unwind. We narrowed our choices down to a few warm beach areas in the US that appealed to us.  

Both of us had both already lived independently, we had almost everything (except for a toaster) that we needed to furnish an apartment together. With that in mind, we decided to forgo the traditional wedding registry of china and bath towels for something more practical…a honeymoon. We shopped around and found a website that would do all the hard work for us! All we had to do was list everything we wanted to do, how much it would cost, and set up a Paypal account. While discussing the beach idea, a friend pointed out to us that this was the one time in our lives people would want to give us money for a trip like this, and we should dream big. So we did…and decided to go to Ireland. Through the website HoneyFund.com, we registered for everything from a night’s stay in a hotel to dinner out on the town to matching carry-on luggage. Friends threw us a travel themed “wedding shower” where family and friends gathered together and blessed us with gifts towards our dream honeymoon. Since most gifts were given online, we were able to enjoy more time with our guests and less time up front opening up gifts that we would later return. Through Honeyfund, our guests were able to choose what they wanted to give money towards. The registry is set up like a store registry, only instead of listing that we need four sets of dishes at fifty dollars each, it listed that we need four castle tours at twenty-five dollars each. People could give towards one or many things, based on their preference. The website kept track of what people gave money towards, so we were able to send out thank you cards specific to the gift, whether it was a castle tour or airline tickets. People gave generously, knowing that their gift was helping us to enjoy our time in Ireland. Through the website, we received over half of the money we needed for our trip. Some people still gave traditional gifts, and some still gave checks or cash inside of a card. At the end of the day, almost our entire honeymoon was paid for by our friends and family. To us, making lasting memories on an unforgettable trip was more important than china that would sit in a cabinet, only being used once every ten years. 

Coming home to our mismatched apartment, we wouldn’t have done it any other way. While we still do not have a toaster and our furniture doesn’t quite match, our apartment is filled with reminders of our trip. Pictures of the Cliffs of Moher hanging on the wall, a clover-shaped magnetic bottle opener that is painted orange, white, and green and reads “Ireland” across it sticking to the front of our refrigerator, coasters taken from various pubs decorating our end table, exclusive glasses bought at the Guinness Storehouse sitting on the kitchen table, and a sweater made of Irish Sheep Wool (which we affectionately call Ba-a-a-arbara) hanging in the closet. Every time we sit on our hand-me-down couch, we look at all the pieces of Ireland we brought home with us, we are so thankful for the memories we made. We not only have pictures and souvenirs to show, but stories to tell that will be passed on to our children and grandchildren. Our newlywed experience goes much further than fine china and matching towels. Our experience built a foundation of love, adventure, travel that will run throughout our marriage for the rest of our lives.