The $20 Item You Should Add To Your Wedding Budget Immediately

Plus: which one to buy so you can avoid a rage-filled trip to Michaels.

One of things you may not expect during wedding planning is the amount of paper that comes into your life.

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From programs to banners to the little sign that displays your wedding hashtag, you end up with a lot of printables.

And because those cute little signs are never 8.5" x 11" (of course they aren't), you're probably going to need to do a lot of cutting.

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Which means a paper cutter is one of the most useful things you can add to your wedding budget.

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So! You may find yourself four weeks out from your wedding, on your third trip to Michaels in a single Saturday, completely ready to just elope... trying to choose between the two brands of paper cutter available to you:

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On the left, the Fiskars paper cutter. On the right, the Recollections brand one. Both cost $19.99 (but obviously you're going to get it for less than that because you've got your 40 percent off coupon at the ready). And they have pretty similar features.

So... which one should you buy?

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For the love of Pinterest, buy the Fiskars one.

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I've actually owned both of the paper cutters. I bought the Fiskars one a few years ago and it served me well when I was planning my wedding. But I put it in storage when I moved from a house to a small apartment... and then found myself really needing a paper cutter for a BuzzFeed DIY project. When I went to Michaels to buy a new one, I decided to mix things up and get the Recollections one instead.

The Recollections cutter boasts a swing-out ruler AND it has a special blade that scores paper.

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The Recollections one seems fancy! But: It does. Not. Work.

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One of the basic requirements of a paper cutter is that it makes it possible to cut paper in the exact the spot you want to cut it. The type of paper cutter shown above — where you sliiiiiide the blade down the paper instead of slicing into it, guillotine-style, like the TERRIFYING ones the teachers used when I was a kid — should make it extremely easy to do this. (Seriously, you'd have to go out of your way in the product design process to not have it do this.) But the Recollections one… did not make it easy. I could not, in fact, see where the cutting blade was going to cut. And so my cuts ended up being off just a bit. And sometimes way more than a bit.

At first, I figured I could just deal with it. But then the cutting blade started popping off every time I tried to slide it back to its resting spot. Between this and the inaccurate placement, I got fed up.

So I printed a new coupon (obviously), marched back to Michael’s (where — FOR ONCE! — the line was pretty short), returned the Recollections paper cutter, and bought the Fiskars paper cutter.

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It worked perfectly and I'm sorry for ever doubting it.

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Note: This is not sponsored post — I just hate having to return things and wanted to keep other DIY enthusiasts from making the same mistake I did!