Your Wedding Budget in Four Steps

How to succeed in the most emotionally-charged of budgeting events

Photo by Foto Pettine on Unsplash

Sticking to a budget is never an easy task and wedding budgets are particularly challenging because weddings are emotionally-charged. But the key to getting married on a budget — big or small — is precisely to use emotions to your advantage.

Try these four steps to stay on budget when planning your wedding.

1. Put a limit to your budget based on your economic situation, not based on the cost of wedding services
2. Uncover what really matters to you as a couple and come up with a vision for the wedding
3. Identify the key features that align with your vision
4. Break the features into budget lines

Step 1: Put a limit to your budget

When you get engaged, the excitement is uncontrollable. You’ll find yourself googling for ideas to make your wedding unforgettable. Your friends will text suggestions. You’ll save links and you’ll buy magazines.

But before you do all that, it is worth it to have a heart-to-heart with your partner. Actually, be prepared to have a few heart-to-hearts over the coming months!

Money is a good place to start. Focus the first heart-to-heart on the economics around the wedding.

Neither of you should feel overwhelmed by the cost of the wedding.

The first decision is how much you two are willing to spend on the wedding celebration. It’s just a number, but it is very important because it is the maximum amount of money you are comfortable spending on your wedding.

It is important to reach that number together and it is important to be understanding. Neither of you should feel overwhelmed by the cost of the wedding.

Be prepared for some back and forth until you reach an agreement, but if you are lucky, it can be surprisingly easy. My wife and I got it over with in about two minutes.

— I’d try to do it under $2,500.

I was positive that she would laugh at me, but, instead, she asked:

— Does that include the honeymoon?

— Yes, do you think we can make it? — I replied.

— Okay.

I’m not saying your conversation will go as swiftly — I’m not even saying it should —, but every engaged couple should have this conversation as soon as possible. Your budget may be even more limited or it may be multiple times higher, and you may not even be paying for the wedding yourselves, but it is always important to reach a common understanding on such much it is OK to spend.

Remember that all you are doing at this point is exploring how much you are comfortable spending. It has nothing to do with how much wedding services cost and a lot to do with your personal situation and views.

Here are a few questions that can help you and your partner get to that magic number.

• Do we really want to be in debt?
• Who is paying for the wedding?
• Are we OK asking our families to chip in? Is it fair to them?
• Given how hard it is to save, how deep do we want to go into our savings? How long will it take us to save that amount again?
• What costs fail we be facing in the near future? Are we going on a honeymoon? Are we planning to buy a house? Are we planning to have kids soon?
• Is it worth it to take a loan?

Step 2: Uncover what really matters to you as a couple and come up with a vision for the wedding

In general, committing to a budget is no easy task. On the one hand, unexpected costs keep adding up. On the other hand, we often lack the willpower to stick to it. A little here and a little there soon piles up.

Weddings are particularly challenging. They are just too close to the heart and we want them to be perfect. But the key to staying on budget is precisely to use emotions to your advantage.

To do that, spend time talking about your feelings, what being married means to you and, ultimately, what really matters to you as a couple. Little by little, a common vision will take shape. The idea is to turn to your feelings and to step away from the pomp.

The more you do this, the easier it will be to tell what’s important apart from the clutter, from all those extras that keep increasing your costs and contribute zero to your happiness.

For this exercise of soul searching, the following question may be useful:

• What does this wedding mean to you as a couple?
• Why are you getting married and why are you celebrating?
• What kind of people are you? What do you enjoy?
• How do you behave at parties? What do you enjoy and what bores you?
• If you were extremely poor and had $0 to spend on the celebration, how would you celebrate?

Again, the answers to these questions will be very different across couples and that is OK. Not all couples are the same and not all weddings have to look the same. The bride doesn’t even need to wear a wedding dress if she doesn’t want to. It’s your day.

Weddings are particularly challenging. We want them to be perfect. But the key to staying on budget is precisely to use emotions to your advantage.

Your day, plural. It is not your wedding; it is yours and your partner’s. So if you’ve been picturing your wedding day since you were 6, you’ll need to let go. That picture was formed without the most important piece of the puzzle in mind: your partner.

Finding a common vision for your life together might be a hard test to take at the worst time to test your relationship, but better late (while planning a wedding) than very late (after the wedding). If you aren’t ready to get married — don’t.

Step 3: Identify the key features that align with your vision

Once you have searched within and agreed on what really matters, you can put things under a very different light. You’ll find it easy to cross out features that many would consider mandatory, but truly aren’t if they are not aligned with your vision of what really matters.

In our case, what really mattered was sharing the day with our loved ones and giving them a sneak peek of what we were as a couple. We are sentimental, we are informal, we see the fun and the value in small things. So once that was clear, it was easy to do away with fictional musts. For example, I decided not to buy new clothes for the occasion (the bride did get a beautiful white wedding dress). We also avoided the hefty prices of a typical wedding space and, instead, we reached out to a restaurant where we had one of our first dates and booked the place for the evening.

It is hard to get rid of all our preconceptions about weddings. All those big scale weddings we’ve seen on TV… The bragging on Instagram… Whatever grandiose wedding you’ve attended… We all have a mental list of features a wedding is supposed to have, but that is just fiction. All that a wedding needs to have is a loving couple; all the rest is optional.

Since you cannot completely remove those preconceptions, the least you can do is protect yourself from more. You can stop using wedding planning services, browsing the internet, and collecting ideas from Pinterest. All those people are trying to sell you stuff. They are trying to get you to spend more. Stop searching outside. Search within instead.

Step 4: Break it down into a budget

The most important learnings I can share about budgeting a wedding are on steps 1 to 3. Step 4 is about basic budget management and any couple prepared to handle household finances should find this part easy.

To show that it is possible to get married on a budget — even a very tight one! — , here’s my wedding budget. This budget includes all our wedding costs, plus hotel and train tickets for our honeymoon. One column for budgeted costs and another one for the amount spent.

Now that you’ve thought about the key features that will help your accomplish your vision, you can break them into budget lines. Some features will come at no cost, others will be cheap and others will be expensive.

Start with the most important ones and assign an estimated budget for each one. If you can clearly state them in order of importance, all the better. That way, as you feel that you are approaching the overall budget limit you established in step 1, you can simply stop adding lines.

It helps to assign a budget to each line just so you can totalize and make sure you don’t exceed the desired total budget. But unlike the budget you set in step 1, individual budget lines are not set in stone. As you start planning and find out what each service costs, you may move resources from one line to another, as long as you stay within the total budget.

In our case, we initially included a line for “wedding night hotel” that quickly came down to $0 as we learned one of our guests wanted that to be their wedding gift to us.

Remember also that there is no need to spend all your budget. If you can spend less, all the better. Unless you’ve won the lottery since you agreed on a maximum budget, you should hold that amount sacred.

When planning my own wedding, I realized that the most important features we wanted were free. We could have spent more money, but looking back, the best parts of our wedding were inexpensive. Writing and reciting your own vows (free), surprising her by playing one of her favorite songs in the middle of the ceremony (free), mingling with friends and family with a dinner buffet (cheaper than table service)...

Conclusion

It is easy to get carried away when you are planning your wedding. We fall prey to our own expectations, but it’s all a mirage. Weddings don’t need to have this or that. Your wedding can be whatever you want it to be.

The challenge of staying on budget in such an emotionally-charged event has a lot to do with how well you communicate with your partner and with your ability to agree on a shared vision. The rest, the money part, is no different than buying a car. You set a budget and then you juggle around key features to maximize what you can get for that budget.