Countdown to your wedding: The to-do list

Here's our breakdown of approximately when you're supposed to do what between now and your big day. Remember, each wedding plan is different -- so use this as a guideline to make your own customised checklist to stay on top of all your wedding to-dos.

Six months prior (or as soon as you know you're getting married!)

Take the time to map out your dream wedding vision.

Tackle the building blocks of wedding planning decisions -- make your budget, pick your wedding date and draw up your guest list. Consider your pre-wedding parties at this time as well (if you're having any).

Decide if you're going to hire a wedding planner, and if so, hire one quickly so they can jump in to help right away.

Decide if you want to have a destination wedding -- since that will impact all of the other decisions to come.

Send out 'save the date' notices to any out-of-town guests who might need extra notice to make it to your events.

Make your plan for eating healthy, exercising and getting proper sleep to help you look your best for the wedding.

Start shopping for your trousseau and wedding outfits. Note that designer couture can take three to six months to execute. You can wait a few months if you're planning to buy readymade and won't feel the need to check out every store in town (or make shopping trips in multiple towns). But either way, you'll need two or three fittings per outfit to get alternations just right -- plus time to pick out the perfect jewellery, footwear and lingerie to match each ensemble.

Reserve hotel rooms or guest house accommodation for your out-of-town guests.

Five months prior

Find the priest (if applicable).

Research and book the vendors you'll need for each wedding event: venue, caterers, decorators/florists, stationery, designer/printer and DJ/band (you can start researching your photographer/video man, choreographer and mehendi artist as well, though you won't need to book them right away). If possible, you and each vendor should sign a contract and you might need to put down a deposit.

Four months prior

Meet with each of the vendors you've booked and make a plan for what needs to happen between now and the wedding. Create deadlines for both you and them in terms of when decisions have to be made, samples viewed and approved, and meetings held.

Three months prior

Begin shopping for gifts to exchange with the groom and his family at the wedding.

Work with your priest to plan an event flow for your wedding ceremony, including a list of all the gear you'll need to bring for the rites. Organise a document that explains the wedding day timeline for you, the groom and close relatives. You can use the same information to create a programme for your guests.

Two months prior

Have your first fittings with your tailor for all of your wedding outfits.

Order any jewellery you're having custom-made, as it takes at minimum a fortnight to produce.

Hire a stylist to do your hair and make-up on your wedding day (and for any other events as well). Schedule a trial to make sure you're happy with the look in advance.

Book a mehendi artist to do your henna at your mehendiparty. Ask for a trial if you've never seen their work before and can't get a good feel from their portfolio.

Book a DJ for any events that call for music.

Book a choreographer to bring dancers to one of your events, or if you want help learning a family dance for the sangeet, or a special first dance to perform with your groom. If you're the ones who'll be doing the dancing, make a schedule for rehearsals leading up to the performance.

Give your Notice of Intended Marriage in writing to the Marriage Officer in the district where you or your groom have been living for at least 30 days. If there are no objections to your union, you'll come back 30 days later with three witnesses to solemnise your marriage.

Six weeks prior

This is the latest you should make any drastic haircuts or try skin-brightening or polishing treatments (if your dermatologist recommends them). You don't want to do anything closer to your wedding day if you're not positive about how it will turn out.

Deliver your wedding cards to all of your guests 3-6 weeks before the wedding.

One month prior

Create your wish-list of gifts to share with your families, so they're prepared with good answers if anyone asks what you'd like as a wedding gift.

Your sisters or girlfriends may throw you a hen party or bridal shower this month. If so, enjoy, be a good sport and be sure to thank everyone.

Book you photographer/video man. Make sure they understand the schedule of events for your wedding, the shooting style you're looking for and who and what you want them to focus on.

Return this month to the Marriage Office with three witnesses to solemnise your marriage.

Confirm and approve any favours you're having a vendor produce to give away at your parties.

Three weeks prior

Check back with all of your vendors to remind them about your wedding plans and make any final preparations.

Two weeks prior

Have your final fittings for your wedding outfits. Your tailor should quickly make any last-minute small tweaks and then send you home with each masterpiece.

Confirm the number of out-of-town guests you have coming and make sure you have enough rooms to accommodate them. You may have to contact a few who are slow to respond to your invitation.

Meet your mehendi artist to go over the plan for your henna application.

Meet your DJ to set your plan for what he's going to play at your bash

One week prior

Start welcoming your out-of-town guests as they arrive. Make sure that have an itinerary of all the planned events and that a member of your extended family or friends circle can serve as a point of contact on call to help anyone who needs assistance.

Get all the parlour essentials out the way: facial, waxing, threading, bridal massage. Manicures/ pedicures can be done now if you're not going to be doing any work that can lead to chipping. Or move these appointments closer to the date of your first function. Indulge in a spa treatment or two as well. Though be careful not to try anything for the first time that could cause a rash or breakout on your face.

On the big day!

Hair and make-up: get help from a trusted parlour, or do them yourself.

Have a blast at your wedding!

Post-wedding

Enjoy your honeymoon.

Settle into your new home.

Send thank you notes.

Change your name and all documents/ pieces of identification that use your maiden name.

Organise your wedding photos and video and share them with family and friends.

US unemployment: Worse than it looks

As U.S. jobs disappear at a rapid clip, the official unemployment figure seems understated. While November's 6.7% rate is a full 2% higher than the same time last year, the rate remains well below the 10.8% postwar peak, reached in November 1982. One issue is that the official unemployment number captures only a slice of the total joblessness in the U.S.

To be counted as unemployed in this statistic, a worker must not have a job, be currently available for work, and have actively sought employment within the last four weeks. In other words, a lot of the jobless are left out of the government's tally.

Rajeev Dhawan, director of Georgia State University's Robinson College of Business, says the official unemployment rate is "not a good measure of what is happening in the economy. It's drawn from a sample too small and filled with too many assumptions. Absolute job losses and retail sales give a better idea of what's really happening in the economy."

Fortunately, digging deeper into the labyrinth of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) Web site can offer a more complete, if imperfect, picture of joblessness. Since 1993, the BLS has tracked a category of unemployed called U-6, which captures the total unemployed, plus what the agency calls "marginally attached" workers and those employed part-time "for economic reasons."

For November 2008, that rate was 12.5%, nearly double the official unemployment rate and the highest since the government started tracking this category.

Outside Looking In

Marginally attached workers are those with no job and who aren't hunting for one but who are interested in working -- people who have left the workforce because the employment situation seems so bleak that they've stopped trying. This measure covers anyone who has looked for work in the past 12 months, not just the past four weeks.

In November, 1.9 million workers were marginally attached, up 637,000 from a month prior. This category includes long-term unemployed, such as factory workers who can't find a job paying close to what they'd been earning before. Unemployment rates in construction and extraction jobs such as mining hit 12.1% in November, followed by 9.4% in production jobs. That means the ranks of the marginally attached will increase.

Those employed part-time for economic reasons, who are counted as employed in the official statistic, want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule. As of November, the number of workers in this category rose by 621,000. There are now 7.3 million involuntary part-time workers, up 2.8 million over the past 12 months.

Contract workers, sometimes known as freelancers or independent contractors, face a special set of problems when it comes to being counted by the government. First, employers aren't required to report layoffs of contract workers to the government, so when companies say they're cutting their contractor workforce -- as Google (GOOG) did in October -- no one knows by how much.

These job cuts are also not recorded in the official job-cut statistics tracked by the government. In other words, the 533,000 jobs lost in the November count don't include any of the tens of thousands of contract workers being slashed from company payrolls as the recession deepens.

Falling Between the Cracks

Some self-employed workers are incorporated into other BLS statistics, but not all of them are counted. Those traditionally considered self-employed, such as independent real estate agents or accountants, are included in the government's household survey of the unemployed. But those working as long-term freelancers for one particular company without the benefits of being staff members -- often dubbed "permalancers" -- are not.

That means a good portion of this group, which the Government Accountability Office says makes up 10% of the workforce, isn't properly tracked. "We really don't know what is happening with the [contractor employment] numbers," says Sara Horowitz, founder of the Freelancers Union, a 93,000-member organization of contract workers.

Horowitz says the government should develop better measures of contract workers, perhaps by identifying the number of contractor tax filings with the IRS each year. "An increasing part of the economy is driven by this new workforce, but government agencies haven't updated their methods for counting them," she says.

The BLS does capture other pieces of the unemployment puzzle. It breaks out such demographic categories as education levels. As of November the unemployment rate for college graduates increased less than a percentage point, to 3.1%, while the unemployment rate for high school dropouts rose from 7.6% to 10.5%.

The BLS also tracks such categories as age and ethnicity; the unemployment rate in November was 32% for black teenagers, for example. Other data offer state-by-state comparisons of unemployment rates. In the most recent data, which cover the first 10 months of 2008, Rhode Island and Michigan were tied with the highest unemployment rate, at 9.3%, with California next at 8.2%. Though not officially a state, Puerto Rico's rate stands at 12%.

Still, calls for improving the BLS metrics continue. While Horowitz presses for better accounting of contract workers, Georgia State's Dhawan says the surveys need to account for population growth. "Fifty years ago, the [official unemployment] number had some validity," he says. "Now I have little faith in it."