Wedding Registry

To get my mind off of all the stress that is buzzing around, I turned my attention to the ever-important wedding registry. Being an independent person, I usually buy things for myself as they go on sale and I have the money for it, so I really have a lot of the important things for the home already. What else do you ask for on your wedding registry? I personally had no clue.

The first thing I asked myself was: Do I actually need a wedding registry?

The answer for me was that I do indeed need one. Since I have been accumulating appliances and other home goods for the past several months, the likelihood of some of our guests buying something for us that we already have is much higher. I don't know about you, but I really would hate to get a bunch of chores to run on my wedding night - you know, having to go and exchange things at various stores.

Of course, when you do decide to make a wedding registry, you have to be concerned about two things: people being really cheap, and asking for too much.

If you put a bunch of really cheap things on your lists along with the more expensive things, then you are more likely to only get the cheap things on your list. Also, if you ask for a whole bunch of stuff on your registry list, you are more likely to not get as much of it. Sites often suggest a number of gifts to include on your registry depending on the number of guests attending your wedding, and that's great and all, but that doesn't guarantee that you'll get all of those things.

Especially since we are in a recession (and a really bad one at that), everyone must put their minds to the priorities as well as the cost. Fine china is really nice to own, but how practical is that? All you're doing is covering your plate with food, so you really shouldn't be looking at it (if you're hosting your social event right, anyway, your guests shouldn't be bored enough to stare at their plates). It's much more practical to get a dining set that you would actually use for events other than the super fancy dinners you're imagining you might have in the future (you know, the ones that aren't actually going to happen).

Looking for a site that has most of what I want and having those things at a price that doesn't floor me is really freaking hard. Like any other person with dignity, I will not even consider Wal-mart for my wedding registry. But where else? Sonoma is a nice store, but they are way too pricey for it to be reasonable to expect that I would even get a majority of what I ask for from there. Even Macy's was just too expensive for certain things that I just thought was just not reasonable.

I ended up going with Sears, since they have a lot of the pieces of furniture that I want at a price that I think is reasonable. On the other hand, Sears did not have everything that I wanted at a price that I liked, so I looked elsewhere, and found that Kohl's filled in a lot of those gaps. Kohl's seems to overprice the items that Sears offers at a more reasonable price and vice versa. For all of the cheap stuff that both sites overprice, Target offers at a liveable price.

Three registries. Is that bad? Probably not. Since Target offers things at such a cheap price, and I happen to have had a very bad experience with Target-bought furniture (and thus, will not get anymore furniture from Target), there isn't much on my Target registry, and it is all very cheap stuff. That leads to my next problem:

Deciding which items to keep on the registry. When I first made these registries, I put everything on them. Everything I wanted to buy and everything I'd love to have in my new home. However, when I totaled up the values of the registries, it was over $10,000.

Since family members are always stingier than you originally anticipate, I knew that the value had to be brought down to a more reasonable number. In order to achieve this I went through and eliminated the items that were cheap enough that I would be able to buy it at the next sale I happen upon.

Next, I went through and deleted all of the items that were either too strangely-shaped or too large for me to be able to store before I find a new home.

Now, I think that I finally have two wedding registries that I am confident about putting out there for guests to select wedding gifts from: the one with Kohl's, and the one with Sears. The one with Target may just have to be a private shopping list since the items on it are just too cheap for it to be great for guests to pick from.

I don't know if my hypotheses will turn out to be correct, but, we shall see what sort of turn-out I manage to get based on what I've reasoned.