But the best part of all will come later, on your Wedding Night, just the two of you, alone at last—you in your filmy, lacy, highly provocative peignoir, and your groom on his back in the shower snoring and dribbling saliva on his rental tuxedo. My advice to you is: relax, have a glass of wine, and check his pulse every 15 minutes. Don’t be alarmed if he has none. This is normal, for grooms.

Pranks

It is the responsibility of the best man and the ushers to play fun and comical pranks on the Happy Couple, such as—this is a good one!—just before they come rushing out of the reception, ready to leave on their honeymoon, you take their car and—get this, guys!—you sell it and keep the money. Ha ha! The Happy Couple will sure talk about that for a number of years!

The Honeymoon

Most couples prefer to take their honeymoons away from the familiar and the ordinary, to go to an exotic, different, and foreign place, such as Epcot Center. I am not kidding here. A lot of couples really do honeymoon at Disney World. Of course they don’t admit this. They say they’re “honeymooning in Florida,” because they don’t want people to know that the highlight of the whole wild lustful romantic adventure was shaking hands with Goofy.

Of course there are plenty of other possibilities for your honeymoon. Your friendly travel agent will give you mounds of brochures from all kinds of resorts desperate to obtain your honeymoon dollar.

Thank-You Notes

Thank-you notes are your last major responsibility as a bride, and the rules of etiquette require that you try to get them all done before the marriage legally dissolves.

The proper wording depends on whether or not you remember what the people gave you. If you do remember, your note should say specific nice things about the gift:

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Sternum:

Thank you ever so much for the very thoughtful fondue set. Mark and I feel that, of all the fondue sets we received, the one you gave us is definitely one of the nicer ones, in that particular color.

Sincerely, Elaine and Mark

If you don’t remember what gift they gave you, you’ll have to compensate by sounding very grateful for it:

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Sternum:

We just don’t know how we can ever thank you for the extremely wonderful gift you gave us. It has become the focal point of our entire lives! We think about it all the time. We are seriously thinking about quitting our jobs and forming a religious cult that just sits around all day worshipping this gift.

With Extreme Sincerity, Elaine and Mark

Chapter 7. Newlywed Finances

Household Money Management

It Is sad but true that money causes a great many unnecessarily fatal squabbles among newlyweds. Very often this is because of a difference in priorities. For example, you want to buy food, while your spouse wants to buy a thoroughbred racehorse. It’s important, in these situations, for both of you to be willing to sit down together and try to achieve a work able compromise. In this case, you could buy a thoroughbred racehorse and eat it.

Often, however, the solutions are not that simple. This is why it’s so important that right now, while you’re just starting out, you draw up a realistic household budget. I can help you here. I have lived in a realistic household for many years, and I would say, based on experience, that your typical weekly expenses should run pretty close to the following:

REALISTIC WEEKLY HOUSEHOLD BUDGET FOR TWO PEOPLE

Food that you buy and eventually eat $30.00

Food that you buy and store in the back of the refrigerator until you have to throw it out because it looks like the thing that burst out of that unfortunate man’s chest and started eating the spaceship crew in the movie Alien 55.00

Pennies that you get as change and put in a jar, intending to someday put them in those wrappers and take them to the bank, when in fact you will die well before you ever get around to this 117.48

Rent, clothing, car payments, insurance, gas, electricity, telephone, magazines 829.12

Miscellaneous 2,747.61

As you can see, there are a lot of expenses associated with running a household, and to meet them, you will need Financial Discipline. Each week, when you get your paychecks, you must set aside $3,779.21 right off the bat, to cover your weekly household budget. If your combined weekly paychecks total less than this amount, perhaps you should go back and marry a rich person (see Chapter 1). Your other option is ...

Credit Cards

Credit cards are an excellent source of money. The way they work is, people you don’t even know mail them to you, and then stores, for some reason, let you use them to actually buy things. (No, I can’t figure it out either!)

The thing is, you have to be responsible about how you use your credit cards. You can’t just rush out and charge every single item in the store. Think ahead! How would you fit it all into your car?

So I strongly recommend that you be cautious with credit, following the wise Borrowing Rule of Thumb employed by the federal government, which is: “Never borrow any amount of money larger than you can comfortably pronounce.”

Your Checking Account

This is another potential source of money, although it’s usually impossible to tell how much money is in it. The important thing is to try to keep your checkbook “balanced.” Here’s how.

1. Each month the bank will send you an envelope containing a bunch of used checks, which, for tax purposes, you should place in a two-ply grocery bag and eventually misplace. Also in the envelope will be:

* A little note entitled “TO OUR CUSTOMERS!” that will feature a cheerful and totally unintelligible message like this: “Good News! First Fiduciary Commonwealth National Savings & Loan & Bank & Trust is now offering 3.439087654970 Growth Bonds of Maturity yielding 2.694968382857%

Compound Annualized Rate of Secretion!” You should try to save this note, for tax purposes.

* A piece of paper covered with numbers (your “statement”).

2. Okay. Now open up your checkbook and take a look at the kind of checks you have. If you have the kind with little nature scenes printed on them, or, God help us, little “Ziggy” cartoons, you’re much too stupid to balance your own checking account, and you should definitely go back and marry a rich person (see Chapter 1).

3. Now examine your check register (the part of your checkbook that you sometimes write on).

4. Now compare and see if any recognizable numbers on the “register” are the same as any numbers the bank has printed on the “statement.” If you find any, you should put a little happy face next to them.

5. If your total number of happy faces is five or more, then your account is what professional accountants call “in balance,” and you can go on ahead and watch TV. If you score lower than five, you should get on the phone immediately and explain to your bank that they have made some kind of error.