We are delighted to provide you with a romantic, intimate and affordable celebration of your love.  All our packages have been created to include a  “nicer than expected” environment, traditional yet personal elements and our full attention.  We are happy to accommodate you wedding seven days a week and at hours that other officiants might consider “too late” or “too early”.  You are making a commitment to each other and we are committed to a special memory for you.

In return we ask the following:

• If you request a date and time, know that we are holding it in expectation that the agreed upon deposit will be made ASAP to confirm. Once a deposit has been made, it is non-refundable because we have arranged other activities around accommodating you.
• If  the situation changes, even before the deposit it made, we request a courtesy call to let us know.
• Understand that we schedule your wedding for your convenience as much as possible.  We know how long each celebration takes and have other events on our calendar before or after yours.  If you are running late, it has an impact on another couple, us or both.  If you request a last-minute time change of an hour or more, there may be a surcharge.
• Please ask your guests to arrive no more 30 minutes in advance of the wedding since there may be another event taking place before yours.

We truly feel honored to help you move into this new chapter of your lives.  We put a lot of ourselves into making it special for you.  This an important part of our lives, but it is not our entire life and so we ask for mutual respect of our time.

Thank you.

Here’s an article from the Huffington Post, exploring the possibilities about changing your last name.

If there’s a group of women with a notable last name right now, it would have to be the Kardashians. But the fame attached to that name isn’t keeping middle sister Kim from dropping her celebrity moniker when she weds New Jersey Nets forward Kris Humphries this weekend. And the future Mrs. Humphries will hardly be alone in her decision to take her husband’s name.

In March, the wedding website TheKnot.com surveyed nearly 19,000 women who got married last year. Of those women, 86 percent took their husband’s name. The practice of women keeping their names, first introduced in the U.S. by suffragette Lucy Stone in the 20s and popularized during the Women’s Rights Movement of the early 70s, peaked in the 1990s at 23 percent. By the 2000s, only 18 percent of women were keeping their names, according to a 2009 study published in the journal Social Behavior and Personality. Now, according to TheKnot, it’s at just 8 percent.

But the fact that most women are willing to change their names doesn’t mean the decision is an easy one. Making that choice can bring up all sorts of emotions — and we’re not just talking about the homicidal urges prompted by back-to-back visits to the DMV and the Social Security office.

“I’m not a Kardashian, but I still had a whole life based on my name,” said Baily Bernius, 24, who works for a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., and was known as Baily Tombs until she got married last year and took her husband’s name. “It was a bittersweet thing,” she said.

So why did she do it?

“It’s kind of a way to show the world that I’m part of a new family now and that I’m proud to take my husband’s name,” Bernius said. Her desire to do that, she said, outweighed her occasional feelings of envy toward the girls her brothers date.

“I sometimes think about that: Whoever my brothers marry, they’re going to inherit what I consider to be an awesome name,” she said. “I look at their girlfriends and I’m like, ‘You need to earn this name.’”

There are a myriad of options when it comes to the name-change debate: you can keep your name, take his, take his last name and make your maiden name your middle name, take his last name legally but keep yours professionally, or hyphenate the two names (TheKnot’s survey found that just 6 percent of women hyphenated their names last year, and the practice seems to get a collective “no thanks” from women in wedding website community forums).

Women who keep their names have tended to marry older, have higher levels of education and are more likely to work in medicine, the arts or entertainment than women who take their husband’s names, according to the 2009 study. But when women who’ve built entire brands on their maiden names are giving them up — like Kim Kardashian and Katy Perry, who’s legally Mrs. Brand now — the trend can seem even more pervasive.

Women “view it as some crazy glue holding their marriage together,” said Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economics professor. In 2004, Goldin studied the New York Times‘ marriage announcements, Massachusetts birth records and Harvard alumni records, and found that fewer college-educated women were keeping their names than in the 1970s and 1980s.

The reasons women cite for taking their spouse’s surname vary: some like the tradition of it, and others find it romantic. In some cases, it’s more important to their husbands, and some feel it will be more convenient once they have children. Some women even argue, counterintuitively, that taking their husband’s name is a feminist choice.

“I wouldn’t say I’m militant, but I do consider myself a hard-core feminist,” said Renee Powers, who is 25 and living outside Chicago. Her name was Renee Woodward until she got married two years ago and took her husband’s name.

“We operate as a team and now we have a team name,” she said. “God that sounds cheesy, but it’s true.”

Powers, who is getting a master’s degree in new media and women’s studies, argued that her decision doesn’t conflict with her belief in female equality and autonomy.

“We recognize all the hard work that came out of the women’s movement, everything that [members of the movement] did to get us to this place,” she said. “My decision to change my name was absolutely a feminist choice. It was made with intention. It was educated.”

Stephanie Coontz, a professor of history and family studies at Evergreen College and author of several books about American family structure, said that many of the women who changed their names in the 1970s did so in response to inequality that had been built in to marriage for so long.

“Marriage made a wife not seen and not heard. It legally did so,” Coontz said, noting that during research for a recent book, she came across the story of a woman who couldn’t get an apartment without the permission of her husband, who was in an insane asylum.

According to Diana Boxer, a professor of linguistics at the University of Florida who studies gender and language, today’s feminists aren’t concerned by many of the issues that riled feminists in the past.

“It’s not so much, ‘I am woman hear me roar,’” Boxer said. “The women of this generation feel we are roaring enough.”

Boxer argued that the number of women changing their names today can in part be explained by an uptick in the cultural emphasis on romance.

“They’re into the whole idea of, ‘I’ve always waited for my Mr. Perfect, and now that I’m going to get married, I want to do everything the romantic way,’” she said.

A 2009 survey by researchers at Indiana University showed that 71 percent of respondents believed a woman should change her name, and half of those respondents went so far as to say the practice should be legally required. These numbers may help to explain why those who keep their names are sometimes criticized for their choice.

When writer Julia Porter blogged about deciding to keep her name, commenters accused her of not really loving her husband. It’s not an uncommon response — women who blog or post to online forums that they are keeping their names are often asked whether they are really committed.

Some women and their fiancés sidestep the decision — and potential judgment — by taking a different path altogether.

Eric Jankstrom, 28, formerly Eric Jankowsky, works in television in New York and is among the small number of men giving up part of their names. He and his wife Laura Lindstrom got married last August and are calling themselves the Jankstroms.

“My wife is a very progressive woman,” Jankstrom said. “She was like, ‘I don’t like your last name. I’m never going to be an ‘owksy.’”

The couple agreed there was something appealing about creating a new family tree, and they’ve since dreamed of what the Jankstroms might accomplish.

“We were like, imagine if there was President Jankstrom. How cool would that be?”

Emily Zeugner, 32, who works in media in New York, and her husband, Amos Kenigsberg, made a similar decision — they changed their last name to Zeeberg.

Ms. Zeeberg explained that changing her name would have sent a message she wasn’t comfortable with, one that that effectively said, “I’m shedding my identity, I’m joining your family.”

“As a feminist, it really bugged me,” she said. “I’m glad that we created our new identity.”

After the two married, they received a wedding invitation addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Amos Kenigsberg.

“I just saw the envelope, and I felt such annoyance, and on a small scale, kind of outraged,” she said. “He gets full billing and his full name, and the only thing I get is Mrs. It just really pissed me off.”

The new last name was hard for both of them to get used to at first, she said, and her husband got a lot of comments from surprised Facebook friends. But now?

“It’s just, we’re the Zeebergs, and it seems totally normal and natural,” Ms. Zeeberg said. “I don’t know why more people don’t do it, I feel like it should be the wave of the future.”

There’s no sign that nuptial portmanteaus are sweeping the nation — yet — but that’s not so surprising, considering how attached some men are to their names, and to everyone else in the family taking those names.

Kate Sullivan, 33, a New Jersey wedding planner who was married in January, plans to take her husband’s name, Corpuz.

Though Sullivan said her husband wouldn’t have kicked and screamed if she kept her maiden name, it certainly mattered to him: Even the couple’s dog, Baily, who currently has both of their last names (separated by a hyphen) will soon have his official surname changed.

Sullivan said her husband has asked her several times to take care of the matter. “He’s appalled that [the dog] is Sullivan” at the vet, she said. “I’m going to feel like an idiot trying to explain it.”

If You Do Change Your Name

Remember, when you leave here with a copy of your marriage license, you can take it to the Social Security office to change your last name. If you have a South Carolina driver’s license, you can do the same. You’ll need an additional certified copy ($) of the marriage license from the Court from which you received your license if you have a driver’s license from another state, or if you or your husband is in the military or if you need it for immigration purposes.

How to Create an In-Case-of-Emergency Everything Document to Keep Your Loved Ones Informed if Worst Comes to Worst

written by Melanie Pinola

Now that you’re married, would your new spouse or your/their family be able to quickly locate your important information or know how to handle your affairs?  Your record keeping systems might not be obvious to family members or friends who might need immediate access to them in times of emergency. Here’s a step-by-step guide to organizing your vital information so it can be conveniently and safely accessed when needed.

The Goal: A Master Document or Folder with All Your Important Information

An easy method for creating a centralized document is to create a Google Spreadsheet that you could share with your family and friends and keep updated regularly. Lifehacker created a basic Master Information Kit template just this purpose. https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?authkey=CIW485gI&hl=en_US&key=tDX4Z2k2KazjHdo7YqxMFog&toomany=true   The spreadsheet includes prompts for the information below, but you can customize it for your particular needs. To use the template for yourself, in Google Docs go to File > Make a copy… to save it to your Google account (make sure your version of the document’s sharing settings go back to the default “Private”).

There are really only a few steps to setting this organizer up: gathering your records, securely sharing them, and keeping them updated.

Step 1: Gather Your Vital Records to Keep in the Master Information Kit

The most important personal records: First, there are a few documents that you obviously should keep in a secured location (a fire safe or safe deposit box):

* Social Security card
* Birth certificate
* Marriage License (with original signatures)
* Passport
* Any other official, hard-to-replace documents

Scan these items so you can have a digital record of them as well. If you encrypt the digital files, e.g., with one of our favorite encryption tools TrueCrypt, and you can even upload them to Google Docs and share the files with your loved ones (make a note of them in the spreadsheet).

You’ll also want to add to your emergency records kit:

o Contact information: Both your contact information and your emergency contacts’ info. This includes your nearest relatives, your will executor(s), and employers.
o Will and medical directives: Add a copy of your will/living trust and medical letter of instructions (keep the originals with your legal representative). You can upload a PDF file to Google Docs for this purpose.
o Insurance: Homeowners, auto, medical, life, disability, and other insurance agents/brokers contact info and policy numbers
o Financial accounts: Bank, investment, and credit card/loan accounts information, including institution names, phone numbers, and account numbers
o Health records: Immunization records, allergies, dietary restrictions, medications, medical/surgical treatments
o Pet information: Description of each pet, vet contact information, and any important medical notes
o Property: Car information, home purchase papers/deeds, and other home inventory items.

Step 3: Export Your Accounts Information

Account Passwords: For login information to important accounts, it’s best not to store your logins in an online document like this. Instead you can export your logins from password managers like Keepass, LastPass, or 1Password to a CSV file and then encrypt it so it can be shared securely.

Step 4: Share Your Master Information Kit and Vital Documents

The Google Docs spreadsheet is easy to share. Once you’ve filled out your version of the spreadsheet, click on the Share button and you can email people who you want to be able to view or edit the document. (Think people who you’d also consider emergency contacts.)

For your encrypted files, like the logins mentioned above, you could upload them in Google Docs, store on an encrypted USB thumb drive, or use something like Dropbox. Give the recipients your encryption password but for security reasons, only let them write down a hint to the password. E.g., vacation spot 2010 + pet bday + myfavoritesinger’smiddlename. Also, if you use Dropbox, make sure you encrypt sensitive information first. An encrypted zip file seems an ideal solution.
Step 5. Regularly Update Your Everything Document

You’ll need to update your files/master records book when you update your accounts.
Like setting up an emergency plan or a 72-hour emergency kit, this master information kit will need to be reevaluated regularly—consider doing so at least yearly (e.g., at tax time, when you’re already looking at all your accounts) or, better yet, quarterly.

Set up a reminder on your calendar so you won’t forget. When you get your reminder, don’t wait—just quickly look over the items in your document and if anything has changed, update it. If not, you’ve only lost a couple of minutes of your day toward a very good end.
More Resources for Creating a Master Information Kit

If you’re a Quicken user, for example, you may have access to Emergency Records Organizer built into the program, which can compile your emergency documents for you, based on the info you put in Quicken. It should be in the “Property & Debt” menu or you might find the program under your Quicken folder under Program Files.

Marriage is a 24/7 event. It requires all the things you promise each other in the emotional rush of a wedding ceremony. Patience, respect, trust, understanding, loyalty, faithfulness, friendship. These are easy words to say but they are more challenging “verbs” to live on a daily basis. As you share these words on your wedding day, truly listen to what each of you is promising in the good times and bad. Put whatever higher power guides you first and work to live your promises daily.

I’m always here to remind you what you said to each other.

The “Romantic Little Wedding” package is being offered for the discounted price of $249 for the month of December, 2011. (New Year’s Eve regular price $299. Time slots available.)  That means you get a whole wedding (venue, decorations, flowers, music, cake, pictures and more) for $50 less than any other time.

You don’t need to wait…you can have your beautiful little wedding with up to 12 of your favorite people in attendance.

Call us today to reserve your date and time.

Jeanne

v       Get a new social security card
Once you get your marriage license (which usually takes a couple of weeks to arrive in the mail), download a form from the Social Security website. Then take that completed form, the license and your identification to your local social security office to get a new card. (if you’ve gotten creative with your last name, you may also need to go through more formal name change procedures.)

v       Get a new drivers license
You’ll also want to change your name on the other main form of identification – your drivers license. Most DMVs will change it with a copy of a marriage certificate, although others require you to wait until your social security card has been changed. Check with your local DMV for their rules.

v       Change that paperwork
Visit your office’s HR department again with your new social security card to change your name on financial information, including your tax deductions. You’ll want to be credited properly with those deductions come tax time, and with your social security contributions when you retire.

For everyone else, including bank, insurance policies, credit cards, utilities, creditors, and membership organizations, type up a letter with all of your information on it, including name, address, new name, account number, and possibly your social security number, and include a copy of your marriage license. No one should charge you money to change your name.

v       Don’t forget to order new checks and credit cards

v       Start using it
It will sound a little funny at first, but as you start using your new last name, everyone else will catch on. Don’t be afraid to courteously correct people when they erroneously use your maiden name.

ID Requirement: You will need to show your drivers license (or voter registration card, birth certificate or passport) and social security card.

Residency Requirement: You do not have to be a resident of South Carolina.

Previous Marriages: Proof of divorce is not needed.

Covenant Marriage Option: No.

Waiting Period in South Carolina: In most South Carolina counties there is a twenty-four (24) hour waiting period. Because of the 24-hour waiting period, if you want to get married on a weekend in these counties, make sure you apply for your license by Thursday.

Fees: The fees charged to get married in South Carolina vary from county to county.

Other Tests: No blood test required.

Proxy Marriages: No.

Cousin Marriages: Yes.

Common Law Marriages: Yes. If you want to have a common law marriage in South Carolina, you can.  Attempts (H 3588) have been made to void common law marriage in South Carolina, but looking at SECTION 20-1-360, it appears that the law has not been changed.

Same Sex Marriages: No.

Under 18: If you are under 18, you will need a certified copy of your birth certificate and a notarized statement of parental consent. The parent or legal guardian has to also appear at the same time as the minor to show their identification and to sign the parental consent form. The minimum age for a female is 14 and it is 16 for a male.

License Expiration: This can vary from county to county

Richland County:

Hours to apply for license:   8:30 AM – 4:30 PM
Fee (paid in cash or check): $40
License expires:                        6 months from date of issue

Lexington County:

Hours to apply for license:   8:30 AM – 4:30 PM
Fee (paid in cash or check):  $30
License expires:                         6 months from date of issue

Kershaw County:

Hours to apply for license:   8:30 AM – 4:45 PM
Fee (paid in cash or check): $45
License expires:                        It doesn’t

Aiken County:  PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS THE ONLY COUNTY WITHIN AN HOUR OF COLUMBIA WHERE YOU CAN FAX YOUR APPLICATION TO THEM.  THIS IS A GREAT OPTION FOR THOSE GRADUATING FROM FORT JACKSON.

Hours to apply for license:   8:30 AM – 4:30 PM
Fee (paid in CASH ONLY):    $45
License expires:                        It doesn’t

South Carolina Probate Offices

Romantic Little Wedding strives to make every effort to provide accurate information.  However, we assume no responsibility for changes made since publication.  Please note that information may change from time to time.  PLEASE be sure to confirm all details with each local licensing office.  If you become aware of any updates or errors, please e-mail us with the information.