How can you find the right budget for your wedding?
Finding the right budget for your wedding can often times be a challenge among couples getting married, especially if they’ve never been through the wedding process to being with.
So, how can you find the right budget for your own wedding? Well, you can’t simply ask online or ask what your friends paid for their own wedding and let me tell you why.
Because each couple is unique and each couple has debt’s different than others up the road, different incomes, different lifestyles and different needs for the wedding day.
So the simple answer is, it’s a bit difficult to answer correctly, although we can give you some tips to help narrow down the answer.
The Biggest Mistake Couples Make with the Wedding Budget
First, I want to tell you that seeking the average price of a wedding (around $34,000 in 2020) or asking people online doesn’t give you the answer, honestly I hate when couples just pick a number and roll with it.
Before you even start with the details, you need to ask yourself a few questions first.
Do you want a large wedding or a small one?
Should we have a micro-wedding instead or elopement?
How important is it to have on a Saturday?
How much debt do we have and could we pay for the wedding without going into more debt at the start of our marriage?
How much do we know about weddings before diving into it? (Do we need to get educated or hire someone to help?)
These are important questions to ask you and your soon-to-be spouse.
You need to look at your OWN Finances
Couples need to look at the current state of affairs with their own finances.
That’s what needs to determine where you should be at with a starting point regarding your wedding budget.
Let’s run a couple of real world scenarios.
Jack and Katherine got engaged in 2016 and has a wedding in 2017 that I covered at Center in the Square in Roanoke, VA. Jack is a sales manager making $65,000 a year and Susan is a Project Manager making $58,000 a year. Both have student loans, a couple of new car payments and credit cards totaling $35,000.
The monthly payments are as follows:
What sort of wedding budget would you think they would choose?
In this example, Jack and Katherine went with a $5,000 elopement.
Why?
When I filmed their wedding in 2016, I asked them about it and they said that while a wedding was very important to them, they didn’t want to spend a lot and get further into debt with the amount of debt they already had.
Let’s look at another real world example here.
Susan & Jenny are partners that fell in love and got married in late 2015 at Silver Hearth Lodge. The Couple had more of a traditional wedding with about 100 or so guests. They both were fresh out of college, making about $40,000 each and very little debt.
They choose to have a $24,000 wedding with friends, family and loved ones celebrating. When I asked them about why they decided on that amount, they indicated they had little debt and could afford to make that wedding work within a 14 month engagement.
Because each couple has different needs, different debts and different incomes, your wedding cost will vary. Sadly, most couples tend to just get a number from another couple and assume thats what it will also cost them.
Wedding Budget Tool
One of the great things about weddings and the internet is that we’ve created an online calculator for you to help give a general direction of what you should be spending based on the whole number that you come up with. Simply, input the value and the online tool will help you figure it out.
Is Your Wedding to Celebrate or Show Off?
I’ve found that most couples want to have the wedding to show off to friends and family than to celebrate and thats okay. Truth be told, when I was getting married years ago, I wanted to have a great celebration for all my friends and family too, although I didn’t get a good chance to enjoy it much.
However, the old I became, the more it was about the celebration than the over-the-top showing off I wanted to do.
Answering that question will ultimately determine how much you’re going to spend on your big day.
I recommend that you read an article that I wrote a few months ago entitled, How Can I actually pay for my Wedding. It should help give you great information on trimming the fat from your wedding day while still maintaining your budget and not having to sacrifice much in the way of the wedding itself.
Why Are Weddings so Expensive?
Well, I’ll be honest with you, weddings are expensive because over the years, couples have demanded more from vendors and services in years past. Many couples have chosen to have the ceremony and reception at a venue rather than a church and venue.
Well, that costs the venue more to operate and in turn, more that you’ll fork out.
The truth of the matter is that you don’t really need a venue, a reception or all the fancy parts of a wedding. In fact, you can get married for less than $100 at a courthouse.
Well, if that the case, then why do couples spend gobs of money to have an over-the-top wedding to begin with?
I recently, I asked a simple survey question on Facebook about why have an over the top wedding and not just run to a courthouse to get married?
The most common answer to the question was actually a very common one, they all wanted family (sometimes friends) to be apart of the big day.
The next most common answer was that the bride wanted to simply be apart of something big or pamper herself.
No matter how much brides spent on the day, they all had a similar theme in common when it comes to getting married and thats having loved ones with them as they celebrate the big day.