Getting Married With Your Sights Set On Long Term Travel? Check out The Honey Fund!.

The following is a guest post from Emily Starbuck Gerson (above w/ Bryan, her husband to be), a travel junkie and professional writer based in Austin, Texas. Emily is recently engaged, so she is in the process of researching honeymoons. She runs the travel blog Maiden Voyage, and you can follow her on Twitter at @TheMaidenVoyage. Her site is awesome so check it out. Go. Now.

Who actually uses their fine china? Do you really need a gravy boat? Now that I’m engaged and starting to think about where to register, the typical wedding gifts just don’t interest me. That doesn’t mean we don’t want gifts to celebrate our marriage! We just don’t want things we don’t need, especially since we already have too much stuff from combining our two lives. As an avid traveler, one of the things I’m most excited about is the honeymoon. So you can imagine my excitement when I learned about HoneyFund.com, a website that lets you register your honeymoon for free. It’s a great way to receive gift money you can use toward your honeymoon while giving guests the feeling of actually giving you something as opposed to just handing over some cash (or buying you something you don’t need).

Before you use HoneyFund, you do need to have a pretty solid idea of what you want to do for your honeymoon, but if you use it properly, you can earn loads of gift money for your honeymoon. On HoneyFund.com’s website, they show testimonials from couples who used it in the past and received between $3,500 and $6,000 through the site. Granted, you have to have many guests and/or guests with generous budgets to make it possible, but HoneyFund is a great way to officially accept and keep track of gift money for your honeymoon. If you make a wedding website, you can give the link to your HoneyFund registry on there, just like couples do with traditional wedding registries. Once you create a HoneyFund.com account, you can give some details about your wedding. You then create a basic greeting that appears at the top of your registry, where you can welcome guests to the page and thank them for participating. In this blurb, I plan to mention that we appreciate the help making our dream honeymoon a reality, and that we promise to bring home plenty of pictures to share. The free account lets you choose a themed vacation image to go on the page, but your HoneyFund registry page itself will look quite plain and have some Google ads. It’s not unsightly, but it’s a bit bland. They offer an upgrade to their Premium service for $29; this will give you an attractive and detailed registry page design (you pick from several), a photo slideshow of you, professional images of your registry items, and no ads. I’m definitely tempted to upgrade.

Next, you give a brief description of your honeymoon and begin to itemize your trip. List out the basic things you need, or things you think guests will enjoy contributing toward. A romantic dinner on the beach. A couples massage at the spa. An hour on a jet ski. A puddlejumper flight from one island to another. Breakfast in bed. An afternoon of horseback riding. Two nights at a hotel. You outline what you need and how much it costs, and you can add a photo for each item if you want. If you need some inspiration, HoneyFund provides many sample registries (http://www.honeyfund.com/SampleRegistries). While your great aunt may bestow you $500, most wedding guests can probably only give you somewhere between $25 and $100. HoneyFund.com allows you break each item into units, allowing guests with a smaller budget to contribute toward bigger items. Let’s say your plane flights to and from your honeymoon cost $1,000. You would list the item as “Plane flight to Mexico.” You would give the total amount as $1,000, but then you select the quantity and price. For example, you could make it 40 units of $25, or you could make it 20 units of $50, or 10 units of $100. As guests buy up units of it, it displays how many units you still need. Say I go with 10 units of $1,000. If someone buys up two of these units, it will show that I still need eight more. The fact that guests can select which item (or items) they want to donate toward allows them to feel like they know what they’re giving you (even if you end up using that amount of money for something else on the trip). Rather than someone just giving you cash and not knowing what you’ll do with it, your guests get the gratification of knowing that they helped you enjoy something special on your honeymoon.

Another thing that makes it easier is you can select how guests pay you; one option is for them to mail a check to you, in which case you give the site your address so your guests know where to send it. There is also an option to give a check at the wedding, so the guest will just pledge the amount online and then (hopefully!) give you the check at the actual event. Another option is PayPal, which allows your guests to directly give you the money online. The site will give your guests your contact information in case they have any questions. Just like with any other wedding registry, from the homepage, guests can enter your last name to find your registry. Once you start getting gifts, your account will keep track of everything for you; the gift, the giver, the amount, the pledge date, and the payment date, and you can add the thank you date. There’s also a tab for “other gifts,” so you can keep track of other wedding gifts and money on here, too!

I’ve started playing around with our HoneyFund registry and it’s very user-friendly, and I can’t believe it’s free. We haven’t decided on honeymoon plans just yet so I haven’t published it, but I have enjoyed playing around with it. You can go back and edit your details at any time. We will probably have a real registry for tangible things at one place to satisfy the really traditional folks, but we will only have a few basic and truly-needed things, like new towels and silverware. But we plan to make HoneyFund our primary registry—we live together and already have tons of stuff! We would rather have an incredible honeymoon experience, and I love that this service exists to make that easier.

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(All Wedding Photos by Nariko’s Nest Photography (aka: me). If you want more information or want to inquire about having your wedding photographed by Nariko’s Nest please contact me at Beth@NarikosNest.com. BeersandBeans readers get 20% and all destination weddings book at 50% off regular rates!! To see more photos please visit NarikosNest.com)

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*Please remember all photos on this website are copyrighted and property of BeersandBeans.com, NarikosNest.com & Bethany Salvon. Please do not use them without my permission. If you want to use one of them please contact me to ask first because I do love to share and I would be flattered. Thanks!