So your wedding day has come and gone, and while it was an amazing experience filled with love and celebration, you find yourself facing a common dilemma: you didn’t receive everything you hoped for from your registry. Most couples, regardless of how finely tuned their registries, will face some version of this same problem.
Perhaps couples forgot to add several important items to their registry, maybe they received multiples of certain items and zero of others, or it’s possible a lot of their guests bought off registry. Whatever the reason, there is a strategy for dealing with this common issue.
Assess your registry
The first thing we recommend couples do is sit down together and review their registries to figure out exactly what they received, what they didn’t receive, any duplicate gifts, and, perhaps, what might be missing or still in transit. In the same sitting, catalog any off-registry gifts you received, cash gifts, gift cards, and anything else you received that you did not explicitly ask for.
As you analyze your registry, patterns will start to emerge that will give you some insight into how your registry performed and why certain items were purchase or missed. For example, it’s not incredibly common, but sometimes registry systems don’t perform as advertised or make mistakes. Maybe the system failed to mark a gift as purchased causing you to receive multiples, or maybe gifts you didn’t register for somehow made their way onto your list and were purchased (a version of this second scenario did in fact happen to us).
The registry patterns you uncover will give you your first indication into how you’ll need to deal with the problem and what you can do to fill in gaps.
Prioritize unpurchased items
Now that you have a complete picture of what you did and did not receive, it’s time to prioritize your unpurchased items. It’s impossible to say how exactly couples should do this and what items they should prioritize over others as these are very personal decisions.
Many couples, however, will or should make some sort of assessment of necessity. What items can you not live without? Pots and pans and bath towels, for example, come to mind. An assessment of necessity will obviously look different for young couples building their first home together versus couples who have lived on their own or with others for any length of time before getting married.
Once you’ve determined how you will prioritize your unpurchased items, we recommend dividing your list into different categories. Something like must-haves, nice-to-haves, and non-essentials. You’ll eventually have a different strategy for dealing with each of these categories.
Make all your returns
The next important step is to process all returns. We won’t sugarcoat this: returning unwanted gifts is one of the least exciting (but necessary) things you’ll need to deal with after your wedding. But keep in mind, this is an important step to arrive at your baseline of how much you’ll have to spend to fill in your registry gaps.
First, closely review the return policies of wherever your unwanted gifts were purchased and make your returns in order of most to least restrictive policies. Your goal is to maximize the amount of money you get back for all your unwanted gifts. Missing a return window is both costly and incredibly frustrating.
Next, when possible, try to make your returns in-person versus by mail. Mailing returns is both time consuming and increases the likelihood of mistakes. Making in-person returns expedites the whole process and will get you to purchasing your most needed items much faster.
And third, accept cash back returns wherever possible as long as it doesn’t require you to accept less money. We’ll admit, cash back returns are rare. Most retailers will force you to accept store credit, and this can be a challenge. Cash is king and will maximize your flexibility. If a return is being made to a store that carries the products you’re missing, store credit is less of an issue. Without a doubt, you will be left with store credit at some stores you’ll need to be creative in figuring out how to use. We had a $175 credit to Neiman Marcus after our wedding. If you know Neiman Marcus, you’ll know how hard it is to find something useful to purchase for just $175.
Find your baselines
Now that you’ve returned everything you can return, you should have a clear picture on what your total return credit is (i.e. the total of your gift card balance and any other forms of store credit). Side note, carefully review the terms of your gift cards or other store credit so you can avoid any balances being prematurely diminished or expired.
With this return total in hand, we recommend couples add to it any cash gifts they received that they want to use toward registry purchases and any extra they plan to contribute from their own money. The latter can be difficult to figure out, especially for newlyweds. In a future post in which we’ll discuss how to maximize registry completion discounts, we will discuss planning for post-wedding registry purchases and how couples can budget for them. In the meantime, you’ll have to assess your individual spend total based on your personal budget and means.
At last, you have arrived at your purchasing baseline (return credits + cash gifts + individual spend contribution) and can begin taking steps to fill in your registry gaps.
Maximize completion discounts
As we just mentioned above, we have a comprehensive future post in the works all about how to maximize completion discounts. For now, we’ll just touch on a couple high points.
Like return policies, it’s really important to carefully read and understand the terms and conditions of your available completion discounts (ideally well in advance of your wedding, but now is fine too). With an understanding of each discount’s rules, couples should now decide which completion discounts they plan to take advantage of and in which order. We recommend couples start with the most generous and least restrictive discounts and work their way down to ones that are less generous or more difficult to apply because of various restrictions.
Keep in mind that with some completion discounts, you are going to be limited to purchasing products that were already on your registry prior to your wedding day. Other more generous retailers will let you add products after your wedding, but only if your registry was created far enough in advance of your event date (to prevent people from creating fake registries just to get a completion discount). So know going into our next step, sorting your purchases, some of your remaining products will need to be purchased from a specific retailer.
Sorting your purchases
Alas, after completing all the pre-work described above (assessing what gifts you received and did not receive, processing returns, understanding retailer policies, etc.), you are finally ready to strategize and make your registry completion purchases.
We recommend couples start by making a simple list or spreadsheet to sort which items you plan to purchase from which retailers. This can be a very simple version written on a piece of paper or (our preference) a spreadsheet that actual does a fair bit of the work for you. In fact, we’ve made a free spreadsheet you are welcome to use for this purpose. We’ll explain how to sort your purchases using this tool.
In the spreadsheet, you’ll see that we’ve included lots of placeholder retailer columns. In this tool (or on a piece of paper), make one column for every retailer from whom you either have gift cards, store credit, or a completion discount. If you are using our tool, enter the completion discount percent, the maximum spend total your completion discount will apply to (if the retailer has one), and the balance of gift cards and store credit.
Once you have a column for every retailer, use your prioritized list of unpurchased items (remember, these are your must-haves, nice-to-haves, etc.) to begin distributing items to specific retailers for purchase. If an unpurchased item was on one of your registries and you’d like to use a completion discount from that retailer, make sure this item goes in that retailer’s column. If you received a lot of off-registry gifts and have ended up with store credit or gift cards with lots of random retailers, you’ll need to get creative as you distribute items. For example, you could fill one retailer up to their maximum completion discount total and then try and find some of your leftover products at these other retailers where you have return credits.
If you’ve pre-planned using various completion discounts to make large post-wedding purchases (perhaps furniture, appliances, etc.), add these items to your retailer columns along with your prioritized products you didn’t receive as gifts. This is an excellent strategy we highly recommend couples take advantage of.
After all your prioritized products are added to your various retailer columns, you’ll have a pretty clear picture for how you can apply your return credits and completion discounts to maximum effect. You might find that you’ll need to move products around among retailers until you find the best allocation to maximize your various perks and credits. This is one advantage of using a spreadsheet that will recalculate your discounts and total out of pocket spend automatically.
Now that you’ve added all your prioritized products, rearranged them to use all of your various store credits, gift cards, and completion discounts to greatest effect, you are ready to start making purchases and filling in your wedding gift gaps.
Final Thoughts
Congratulations! You’ve successfully navigated the post-wedding registry maze and strategically added many must-have items to your cache of wedding gifts generously bestowed on you by your family and friends. By taking the time to assess your registry, prioritize your unpurchased items, process returns efficiently, and strategically sort your purchases, you’ve set yourself up for success in completing your wedding registry. Remember, it’s not just about filling the gaps; it’s about maximizing your resources, taking advantage of all the various retailer benefits available to you, and making thoughtful choices that will enhance you and your partner’s new life together. So, as you embark on this exciting journey of registry completion, enjoy the process and cherish the memories that each new addition brings to your home. Cheers to a happy and fulfilled married life together!
