<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"If you lose your job during your engagement or get engaged before you find a job, don&amp;amp;#8217;t panic. 1. You&amp;amp;#8217;re not alone (this happened to FOUR brides I know&amp;amp;#133;in the last two years alone!) and 2. There are many benefits to being a jobless bride-to-be. But let&amp;amp;#8217;s address the downsides first. Money (or rather, the lack of it). You may freak out when you crunch numbers and realize that it&amp;amp;#8217;ll be hard to throw the wedding of your dreams on little to no salary. If you haven&amp;amp;#8217;t already booked your venue and vendors, you can always push back your wedding date (heck, you can still push back your date back even if you did reserve a place and some services, but you may lose some of those very valuable deposits) and give yourself more time to get a job. Another major con? Stress. Wedding-planning is intense enough without having to do it at the same time as job-hunting. Okay, now that that&amp;amp;#8217;s out of the way, here are the surprising plus-sides to being unemployed and engaged. All that free time! You can use it for DIY projects (money-savers!), taking inventory and taking your time in registering, searching for the perfect vendors in your price range, and taking appointments. In fact, you may be able to negotiate with your vendors: If you agree to meet with them on random afternoons when their schedules are wide open instead of their packed weekends and weeknights, they may be willing to throw in a small freebie. And, if you can convince your mom or a friend to come along, wedding-dress shopping is a lot easier on a Tuesday morning than it is on a Saturday afternoon. Pity goes a long way, too. It sounds icky, but friends and family just may fork over some slightly heftier engagement presents if they know you recently lost your job. Finally, you don&amp;amp;#8217;t have a job to worry about while you&amp;amp;#8217;re wedding-planning. I was gainfully employed throughout my two-year-long engagement, and it was amazingly easy to get distracted by weddings while I was trying to get some real work done. What a pain. Plus, you won&amp;amp;#8217;t feel like you have too much going on at once. Any brides-to-be out there job-hunting? How are you balancing wedding-planning with the job search? Do you think it&amp;amp;#8217;s better or worse to be unemployed while you&amp;amp;#8217;re planning? Need Some Budgeting Tips? How to Jazz Up the Cocktail Hour on the Cheap 6 Ways to Save on Your Wedding Cake An Elegant and Inexpensive Decoration Idea More Ways to Get Glamour Visit Shopglamour.com for cute stuff starting at just $10! Enter the latest Glamour sweepstakes! Follow us on Twitter Add us to your iGoogle homepage Photo: Comstock Images "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/weddings/blogs/save-the-date/2010/06/unemployed-and-planning-a-wedd>