Hello! This is my first time posting, but I have been reading MMM and the forums for several years and have learned so much! :)
I recently got engaged, and my fiance and I are planning a wedding for the spring of 2018! I will be graduating college in December, and he has already graduated and is working. My mom has so generously offered us $15,000 as a gift to pay for our wedding or to save as much as we would like. This money is currently invested in an Invesco account, and my question is how to handle this money?
We have decided to spend $7,000 on our wedding, $3,000 on our honeymoon, and save the remaining $5,000. I have an old car that probably won't last too many more years, and so we wanted to save some towards that. Just for context, we are not combining finances until after the wedding.
However, I am not sure how to handle the $15,000. We are planning to spend $10,000 of it in the next 6-9 months for wedding/honeymoon. My mom can transfer it to my checking account for us to spend. Should she go ahead and transfer all of it now, or should we do more gradual as-needed transfers over the next 6-9 months? My main concern here is that since we are definitely planning on using that $10,000, it might not be a good idea to leave it invested due to volatility concerns. If we had a big market correction tomorrow, our wedding/honeymoon budget could be in trouble. Therefore I am leaning towards converting it all to cash right now - does this sound right? I really don't know how taxes fit into cashing this money out.
For the remaining $5,000, I am not sure if we should:
A) leave it in the invesco account as part of our portfolio once we are married.
B) cash out the money and add it to our emergency fund.
C) somehow roll it over to a retirement account (not sure if this is possible?)
For more context - my fiance has a very stable government job, and I will be job searching in his area and moving out there after the wedding (we are not in the same city). Neither of us have any debt. Here are our current financial situations:
Me:
$1700 checking
$10,000 in a High Yield Savings Account (my emergency fund)
$8,500 in a Roth IRA
Him:
$5,000 checking
$20,000 mutual fund
contributes a large chunk (I think 20%?) to his work retirement account each month
My fiance considers his mutual fund as his emergency fund, where I prefer to have cash. Basically, I think there are several "right" answers for how best to handle this, but I would love some input/advice from financially savvy people! Thanks :)