furnish new home and pay for wedding

[BrickLane]

DP and I are having a busy year - about to move into new place, getting married and honeymoon soon after.

We have managed to save enough cash for the house purchase but are left with nothing once we move. We need to furnish the place and then pay for last few wedding bits and honeymoon.

We are very lucky in that DP has well paid job (and mine's not bad) so we will be able to save quite quickly. However cash flow up front is tough due to shelling out on house move, solicitors, removal etc etc.

So we want to get some credit now to pay for home furnishing and honeymoon / wedding bits which we feel confident we could pay off in a year.

I reckon about £5K would get us all we need to start with for the house, plus about another £4k on wedding etc, so overall we need about £10K in the form of loan / credit card. We are very fortunate and think we could have this paid off in a year to 18 months.

My question is, how best to apply for this credit to maximise our chances of getting the credit now? E.g. do we opt for one of those 0% finance deals for the furnishings, and then apply for credit card for the other £5K? Or will getting the furniture credit deal mean we are then less likely to get the credit card? Should we apply for a loan for the whole lot?

Credit rating overall is very good, and we were approved a mortgage, but we haven't had enough credit card traction or mortgage repayments yet to get our rating up to 100% excellent as not enough opportunity to build credit rating previously.

Anyone have experience of this?

Thank you

why not furnish the house second hand rather than with credit? lose the wedding bits ( guests just want food and drink) and spend on the best bit, the holiday!

furniture on credit is a massively expensive way to buy crap sofas.

Agree- go mad in a British Heart Foundation furniture shop now for considerably less than 5k, and get stuff you love gradually over the next few years.

When we moved into our house in 2001, we had two rocking chairs and a small TV with a wire hanger for the aerial. We had our old bed and that was it.
It was tough going, but guess what in 2014 we became mortgage free and was able to have new stuff, decorate and replace everything without going into debt.
Here's a tip before taking on a loan and incurring more debt.
Make sure that you have an emergency fund (1year) and a life happens fund 6 months - 1 year). One is for if you lose your job, you have enough money to pay the mortgage/bills until you find work and the other is for if something in house breaks down the money is there to pay for it - the boiler for one.
Nothing can turn a relationship to hell fast than being in debt up to your eyeballs and not seeing any way out.

There's no way I'd take credit out to pay for a wedding and honeymoon. Sheer madness and a sign that all the trimmings are more important than the actual vows and marriage.

Bits for the house can be picked up as and when. Everything doesn't have to be new and bought in one go.

If you can save anything before the move I would just prioritise beds ( as in mattresses ) as these are not sold secondhand by nearly any charities. Honeymoon could be delayed. Trimmings- as requested they required?

Sorry, should read"trimmings-are they required?".

Make friends with charity shops, eBay and FB selling groups/ marketplace. You can get fantastic bargains where people seem to redecorate frequently and buy all new furniture and either sell,or donate stuff that's a couple of years old!

We sold a very decent set of sofas for £100 because they wouldn't fit in the new house when we moved, they weren't that old either but we set a sensible price to sell quickly. I had about 100people asking for them. Second-hand does not mean tat.

DH and I literally just did this. The only furniture we had moving in was one bed, an outside table which I got reduced for £40 from B&Q as a dining table and a grotty sofa bed my parents lent us to plonk in front of the tv. Said tv sat on a £25 Ikea coffee table which we only just got rid of.

Everything's sorted now- we got a bed with a decent mattress on the tick but that was it. Everything else was Ikea or bought when we had the money. And you know what, sometimes I look about me I really miss the shitty sofa with no support, or sleeping in the spare room on the old bed waking up at silly o'clock because we had no curtains. We'd just moved in together and it was a really exciting time. It was enough.

Anyway, Buy and Sell pages and charity shops are your friends, especially for things like tables and chairs- a mate got a nice seven-peice oak dining set for £60. Still can't get over the price of them new, even in "cheap" stores. We're still using the B&Q table! Ikea does a pretty decent interest free scheme so that's something to consider, but really think hard about what would be "nice to have" as opposed to what you "need". All you need really is somewhere to sleep, something to eat your tea off and something to flake on watching tv. And even the last one would be a luxury to some!

We got married six months after we moved in together, and it and it was only after we got that out of the way that we could afford most of the "nice to have" bits.

Could you get a 2 year 0% credit card with a 5k limit each? We use ours as we prefer to have our money working for us in investments then we just pay off or transfer for free. We use M&S I hadn't had much credit previously but had no problem. Absolutely fine to use credit if you can afford to pay it back.

It’s not worth getting in debt for a wedding. Just trim your expectations. I’ve seen too many people start married life stressing about the credit card debt they ran up for their wedding.

Re house: slowly acquire stuff as you save ( you don’t need it all perfect from day 1)

Don't get into debt for this. Local Facebook groups are great for picking up bargain furniture. Also Gumtree still in some areas.

People going into second marriages frequently have a whole house full of stuff to get rid of. I'd have loved someone to take it all away for free.