Postponing the wedding. (venting a little)

As far as your vendors go read through the contracts and see if there's a time frame to where you may get your deposit back. So sorry to hear about the postponing though

Vendor refunds - read your contracts. They should have a section on what will happen if the bride/groom cancel.

Send a cancellation notice to your guests. It can be on a postcard to save money on printing and postage. You don't owe anyone an explanation of why this is occurring.

If your contracts don't let you out of much (I seriously doubt they will refund deposits since that's normally what a deposit is for- to hold the date in case of cancellation) and may even still hold you liable for more to be due, you may want to talk to your family about seeing if you can get help financially with the wedding instead of with moving. Moving can be expensive too, depends on your situation. Don't book anything new, see what you can scale back/remove and talk to vendors if they can reduce services (like the photographer working for only 2 hours for the price of the deposit so nothing is lost but no more is due).

Best of luck!

So sorry to hear of the postponing. You both will make it through. I applaud you on knowing what is more important and not creating more debt. Some couples would go on and be deeper in a hole still paying for their weddings. I know a couple of weddings that got postponed to another/later date. Sometimes life throws us curveballs and the one thing is you both still have each other. Let people talk...no one knows your business but you and the groom. People sometimes put their inputs and have opinions when they know they're having problems themselves. Weddings will always be. I agree...you don't owe anyone an explanation of why this is happening. Hope things get better!

That is a big part of our problem, FMIL backed out of wedding plans and decided to put the money to help us move to florida... so our budget is literally at it's breaking point right now; then when my mother found out what FMIL did she recommended we cancel the wedding. (My mother also gave us a gift financially) so we are left with not much and not much time to save what we need.

Why not just scale back and have a smaller/cheaper wedding so you can still get married?

At the end of the day, that's the bit that matters.

Were you planning on moving to Florida anyway? Did you need the financial help for the move? Could you talk to her about putting the money back into the wedding since you're at risk of having to cancel the event and lose out on money you already put down?

Yikes, I'm just sorry for you. Your FMIL sounds like a real peach to change the funds like that... have you told her that her change in plans would make you indefinitely post pone the wedding?

Gotcha, I'm so sorry. I would be devastated too. It seems strange that she would pull the wedding funding if you don't even know if you'll need help with the move yet.

Did she make this decision unilaterally? This just seems off...

It definitely didn't make the wedding impossible, it was just an example of all the bad luck we've been having lately. It's been one thing after another with doctors bills and car troubles and just a ridiculous amount of one bad thing after another. FH lost his job and has been working odd jobs since... It's been a mess. But we're making it through. The wedding budget, however, has been threatened and we don't have the extra funds to just frivolously add on. We shrunk our wedding in size to family only plus bridal party when FH lost his job, so save the dates went out to family. We had rented a small room at a resturant for a small dinner, no dancing or dj, instead of renting a tent and having the dreamy backyard reception i wanted, I had cut the elaborate wedding I started planning when I got engaged last june from $14,000 estimated to $6,000 and i've been working this past week trying to make it even less by asking my photographers if they could do a smaller package since we changed reception locations. it's been frustrating to try to get it down and then all this happens. it's just disheartening.

I would try to still go with the wedding date as planned by keeping it as small as your budget allows. That way you won't lose your deposits and you can still get married! And later on in life if you still want a big day then you wait for an anniversary or vow renewal.