wedding wednesday: deciding on a budget
This is the hardest thing we’ve had to do so far. When we first got engaged we were like oh yeah $15,000 should cover everything (including the honeymoon) umm yeah. We were idiots.
Did you know the average wedding in America costs $30,000?! AVERAGE! In my head I thought that was freaking insane. Whoever is spending that much is going way too over the top with things you don’t need. Until I started actually planning my wedding and saw how much everything actually costs.
Disclaimer: we have a little bit of a larger guest list than the average 150-200 people, so that’s hurting the budget a bit but I’ll give ya a breakdown of what we have booked so far:
- Ceremony Venue: $300
- Reception Venue: $4,000
- Photographer: $7,000
- Videographer: $4,000
Now here’s a breakdown of what we’ve been quoted for other things we’ll need:
- Caterer: $4,000
- Bar: $1,000
- DJ: $1,000
- Photobooth: $500
Okay so what’s our total at so far? $21,800! THEN we still need my dress which I’m guessing will be around $1,000, wedding bands that we’ve looked at are averaging $2,000 together, flowers I have no idea how much they’ll cost, tux rental, hair and nail stylist, wedding coordinator, decor, save the dates, invitations, postage, seating rentals for the ceremony, transportation, hotel room, gifts for the wedding party, gifts for our parents, wedding favors, a cake, a pastor, a marriage license, and I know that’s not everything. Oh yeah and not to mention a freaking honeymoon! Now I’m starting to understand why the average wedding in America costs $30,000.
Now if you’re lucky your parents will help you out somewhat, but if your not, then what? How do you do it? What can you cut?
First lets start with what you can’t cut. I have always been told to make a list of the top three things in your wedding that you cannot cut costs on. Ours are: the photographer, the videographer, and the honeymoon. The photographer and videographer for the obvious reasons, they’re the only way you’re going to document your wedding day. You can’t cut them out. They’re important. The honeymoon because we love to travel together and we’ve had this honeymoon in the works since like 2011. We are going to be adventuring newlyweds no matter what the cost haha.
Now onto the things we can cut. We’ve decided that we don’t really care what we eat, if we have an open bar or not (because yikes on that price), and if we have wedding favors (because who really even keeps those?). So that helps out a little. But it’s still hard. I would hate to not care what we eat and have all of the guests hate the meal that’s served or I would really hate to hear complaints that the bar isn’t open for at least a little while.
I still want my wedding to be enjoyable for more than just us, if we only cared about us we probably would just have a destination elopement. But we aren’t. We want to share this day with the most important people to us and we want them to have fun. Everyone says “the people who love you will have fun no matter what.” But we all now that’s not the complete truth. We all have relatives or friends that love to complain about everything and that’s honestly the last thing I want to hear on our day.
I don’t really have any good app suggestions for budgeting. WeddingWire and The Knot are great for other things but the budget portions on their app drive me nuts. You put in your desired number and they cut costs on everything you shouldn’t cut costs on (photographer, videographer, etc) and jack the price up on things you could really care less about.
In our situation we couldn’t come up with an exact number until we were quoted from the more expensive things (photographer, videographer, venues, caterer, etc). Once they all gave us rough numbers it helped us pick our number a lot easier. I don’t know how people can just get engaged and decide on a number and say no more than that, but if you can do that I’m jealous of you and you’re so lucky because this is the hardest part of wedding planning to date.
