• I was surprised when my parents gave me $5,000 for my wedding, bringing our budget to $10,000.
• On a tight budget, I got creative with the planning, but then I was laid off.
• Although I don't know what the future holds, I'm still getting married on an even tighter budget.

I wasn't born into money. I live paycheck to paycheck on a $70,000 salary while paying off credit cards and college loans from 16 years ago. But still, I'm planning my dream wedding.

I was incredibly surprised when my parents offered $5,000 for the wedding. My dad has an 8th-grade education, and my mom is an immigrant from Austria. They've worked hard to build themselves up and have done well for themselves, but they still pinch their pennies and avoid overspending.

I've also never asked them for money. I've been working, in some capacity, since I was 14 and have always relied on myself to pay for everything.

Thanks to my parents' $5,000, my fiancé and I have pushed our budget to $10,000, knowing we would foot some of the bill ourselves and might possibly get additional family gifts.

Of course, that's a wedding on a budget, but I didn't know how much worse it would get.

I've been a bride on a tight budget

Along with my $70,000 salary, my partner is a freelance journalist, meaning his income is unpredictable. We also live in Chicago, where the average price of a wedding is around $56,000. The majority of wedding venues here cost $20,000 just to rent the space. Food or drinks aren't included.

In a sea of wealthy brides from Lincoln Park, I'm a Southside bride just trying to fib my way into looking fancy.

I designed and made our letterpress invitations ($560), we found a gorgeous wedding venue ($5,500), I scoured Reddit for tips on how to save on flowers ($700 box of real foliage from Costco), and we are having mezze for our rehearsal dinner ($1,000) on a patio at a flower shop ($700).

I splurged on my wedding dress ($2,000), but we are buying our alcohol (TBD) and decided to make our wedding playlist using the app WeddingDJ ($5 a month).

Despite our calculations, the budget increased to $20,000 because we quickly discovered that every little detail adds up.

We were going to be cutting it close, but with my regular paycheck, my fiancé thought we could make it work.

I was laid off, but I wasn't devastated

When I learned the news that I was being laid off, I had just paid for our shuttle service ($788). I worked remotely and saw the Google Meet invitation pop-up for the next day. I had a day to pace around the house and prepare for my 8 a.m. layoff video meeting.

As a journalist for the past 11 years, I've always imagined how I would react if I got laid off. Tears, for sure. Panic, absolutely. But instead, I felt none of those things. I simply laughed.

It's my typical shoddy luck to be having a wedding at 35 years old and lose my income just a few months before the big date.

What could I do? I could sulk. I could lie on the couch. I could freeze up and not do anything. Or I could contact every editor I knew, reach out to all of my contacts, and let them know my situation.

So that's exactly what I did.

As a result, the response has been overwhelming. Friends and former coworkers have been emailing me job listings, sending me a $5 Venmos for coffee, or simply telling me to "hang in there."

My plan for the future and our wedding

If I don't get a full-time job in the next few months — which, let's be real, in this job market I probably won't — I'll be jumping back into freelancing full time after a five-year hiatus.

Is it glamorous? No. Is it what I thought I would be doing at this stage in my career? No. Am I still on severance and not fully realizing how much shit could hit the fan? Yes, so we can circle back on this later. But for now, I feel hopeful.

I'm getting married. Nothing will stop that. There may be some aches and pains when reworking the budget. I might not get to buy as many candles as I wanted. I don't need a hairstylist; I can do it myself. No one needs to know my wedding shoes are $15 from Depop. I can let this news crush me, or I can pull up my bootstraps and carry on.

I was already cutting costs on so many things, and to be honest, it makes planning a wedding more creative, and now that inspiration has intensified. Figuring out alternative fabrics for tablecloths, searching for vintage cakestands, making and printing our programs — all of it becomes more tangible and personal.

And now, lucky for me, I have all the time in the world to plan the party of our lives.

• I'm getting married in six months, but I'm unsure if I want to change my last name.
• I feel no connection to my last name and my partner feels none to his.
• We both don't want to take each other's, so we wonder if we should create a new one.

My great-grandfather, whose surname was Olynyk, came to the US via Ukraine sometime in his '20s. He was a man who could tell a story with fantastical exaggeration, so much so that he claimed that he changed our family surname from "Olynyk" to "Lane" due to his run from the law in Ukraine.

We never did find out what the crime was. The truth is probably closer to his desire to blend into American culture. He might have read it on a street sign and decided it was simple and easy to pronounce, but the former is better lore.

Not only is my last name entirely made up, plucked from the imagination of a man fleeing from a former life, but it feels disconnected from any ancestry. My father never had a relationship with his dad, my grandfather, and we come from a small estranged family in general.

So here I am, stuck with "Lane," a name that holds no real meaning to me or my family. With my wedding soon approaching, I must decide if I will give that last name up entirely.

My wedding is a chance for change

In six months, I'll be married. I always imagined this could be my excuse to discard my last name. I daydreamed of something romantic, something that could fit into my journalism career and make me stand out. Something where I could slough off "Lane" and adopt a new name and beginning.

Unfortunately, Miles, my lovely fiancé's surname, has a similar broken lineage. With descendants from Syria and Turkey, how did he end up with a surname like "MacClure?"

Through a string of events, his dad was given the last name by a stepfather, who passed this name on to Miles. In a similar vein to mine, it's sort of made up. It has no family heritage and no resemblance to where his family comes from.

Neither of us is interested in taking each other's names. He hates his last name, and I find mine painfully boring, so what now?

By getting married, we have some options

We floated the idea of taking his mom's surname — Alwan — from her Turkish father. My mom is from Austria, but her maiden name — Windisch — is a mouthful and easily mispronounced.

We could make up our own name. In fact, if you Google "endangered last names," there's an entire list of last names with fewer than 20 bearers.

Of course, we could dig further into family history and find something exciting, making it our own.

We could also just stick with what we have. We both have careers, bank accounts, memberships, paperwork, etc., tied to our names. Is all of this worth the hassle? Miles says, "No," but I can't help but think this is finally my chance.

It feels strange for me to bring a future child into the world and attach a hyphenated surname of not just one but two names that don't hold any symbolism. Why should "MacClure" and "Lane" be the ball and chain our nonexistent children have to carry around for the rest of their lives?

With busy lives, who knows what the outcome will be

Friends have told me that keeping our names could be a way to reclaim them. We are starting our own future together, and it could be special to breathe new life into them. Others have said I'm thinking about it too much. It's just a name.

But names are who we are. In his book "How to Win Friends and Influence People," Dale Carnegie wrote, "Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language."

They should bring us pride — and remind us of our bloodline and the future that follows.

For now, our surname hangs in limbo. With the panic of planning a wedding alone, I'll probably let this slip by. Suddenly, it'll be six months from now, and I'll shrug and surrender to keeping "Lane." A name that's like a thorn in my side, a millstone around my neck, a cold I can't shake, but hey, at least it's mine.