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"This bride needs to speak up, stat!\nPinterestFacebookWrites Save the Date reader Aubrey:\nMy fiance and I were planning on getting married this fall, but our pastor had a scheduling conflict so we had to move the wedding to (gulp!) June! We&amp;#39;re young couple with a baby and we just moved to a new home in a new state. We&amp;#39;re excited to get married but we have a lot of other things on our plate financially, so we were never planning on a &amp;quot;formal&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;elegant&amp;quot; wedding.\nAnd then my future mother-in-law stepped in. She&amp;#39;s a professional wedding planner for people with much, much bigger budgets than ours. She&amp;#39;s demanding that we use the DJ and photographers that she works with as well as a full-service caterer. She&amp;#39;s hired a design company to decorate the reception hall. She&amp;#39;s dictating the music she wants and the colors she wants and insisting we use the most expensive caterer in town and serve a five-course meal instead of having a simple buffet. I try to stand up to her, but she just ignores me. She&amp;#39;s been making all these phone calls and hiring all these vendors that she&amp;#39;s never said she&amp;#39;s paying for.\nI bought balloons for the wedding and she LOST it when she found out: &amp;quot;We CANNOT have ballons at a wedding. This is NOT a birthday party!!!&amp;quot;\nPart of me feels like she&amp;#39;s trying to ruin our wedding&amp;#8212;but that can&amp;#39;t possibly be right, can it?\nThe worst part is, my fiance was totally on board with the wedding as we initially had planned it, but now that his mom&amp;#39;s involved, we&amp;#39;re fighting all the time&amp;#8212;over the craziest stuff. We had decided we wanted round tables but she says rectangular are best, so now he&amp;#39;s saying he wanted rectangular all along. Beyond the silly fights, we just cannot afford the wedding she&amp;#39;s planning&amp;#8212;and she can&amp;#39;t afford to help us. I&amp;#39;d love to have a big, glamourous wedding, but it&amp;#39;s not in our budget.\nSo how do I get my mother-in-law to back off? And how do I get my fiance to see reason? Help!\nHere are my thoughts:\nYikes!\nWell I think the first thing you need to do is get your groom back on track. For starters, I&amp;#39;d worry less about the shape of the tables and more about your budget, which sounds like it&amp;#39;s a big old mess right now. Sit down with your groom tonight and plug your budget into a wedding budget tool (I like this one) that way he can see for himself that you have X number of dollars for music and Y number of dollars for food, etc. Once you&amp;#39;re on the same page, it&amp;#39;s time for a sit-down talk with your mother-in-law.\nBring a printout of your budget, then review the list of vendors she&amp;#39;s hired. It&amp;#39;s possible she&amp;#39;s planning on getting professional discounts from vendors she works with often&amp;#8212;but you need to get that in writing. Tell her you need her to bring a contract from each vendor. (It&amp;#39;s INSANE to hire any wedding vendor without a contract&amp;#8212;as a wedding planner, she should know that.) And then don&amp;#39;t sign anything that doesn&amp;#39;t work within the parameters of your budget. If you don&amp;#39;t sign anything, you won&amp;#39;t owe the vendor a cent. And if your mother-in-law signs on your behalf, she&amp;#39;s the one whose financially responsible. Obviously you don&amp;#39;t want to send your future mother-in-law into debt, but you can&amp;#39;t let her do that to you, either.\nIf you do decide to go with any of her vendors, reach out the them via email (so you have written proof of the conversation) and say, &amp;quot;Since my fiance and I signed your contract, we&amp;#39;re the ones who will be making any decisions involving our wedding. If my future mother-in-law contacts you with any changes to our agreement, you must run the changes by me, even if she insists she already did. If changes are made to the contract without our consent, we don&amp;#39;t intend to pay the due balance.&amp;quot;\nAll of this is very aggressive, but you&amp;#39;re going to need to be aggressive to avoid going into tens of thousands of dollars into debt!\nLadies, what do you think? Should Aubrey let her future mother-in-law run the show? Or does she need to speak up?\nHave a wedding-y dilemma of your own? E-mail me!\nMore reader&amp;#39;s dilemmas, solved!\n\n If You Were in a Friend&amp;#39;s Wedding Party, Do You Have to Ask Her to Be in Yours? \n\n\n What if Your In-Laws Refused to Acknowledge Your Engagement? \n\n\n Can You Be Happily Married&amp;#8212;But Still in Love With Your Ex? \n\nPhoto: Thinkstock"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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