Talking About A Budget

As I have mentioned, budgeting really is a tough thing to discuss once you get engaged. It involves tedious work, talking about money, and deciding where every amount of money was going. There are also all of the little details involved that you won’t think about until you get started. I knew that talking about our wedding budget was going to be really important, especially with amounts of money coming from my parents, my Fiancés parents, and from the both of us. We needed to start with a baseline, and move from there.

I feel pretty blessed to have been in the Wedding Industry for several years, therefore I know how to get around a few things. Because of this, I also knew the average price of most parts of a wedding, but this made it clear that the wedding I envisioned was going to be a bit out of our price range. I had in mind a few DIYs that we would start with, and then from there we figured out a general plan.

First, we decided what was most important to us. We both agreed that a photographer and videographer would be our “splurges”, as well as guest entertainment. We felt that people coming from all over to celebrate our special day deserve to have the time of their lives. While deciding the most important parts we also decided that the least important would be the food, of course we wanted good quality, but we didn’t feel the need to serve lobster or filet mignon. Once both ends of the budget were decided in this fashion, we filled in everything else.

In the end we figured out our budget to be about $25,000 including extra funds if anything were to go astray, tips, and gifts. After discussing this with my parents, we knew that it wouldn’t be possible to get that much together in 10 months, and we went back to budgeting. The next day I was able to bring our overall budget down to $19,000. I was pretty happy about saving that $6,000 and still having the wedding I have always dreamed of.

In the end, we figured out that Dave and I will be paying for some of the smaller, but very important details such as the photographer, Photo Booth, and decor. My parents will be covering the large aspects, like the tent, rentals and lighting. Dave’s parents will be covering some of the miscellaneous things and they are saving the day with buying the alcohol.

We are blessed to have many friends and family that are more than willing to help with crafting, setting up, planning, and turning our visions into reality. Our biggest success so far has been starting to collect gifts and decor one week after getting engaged. Good thing we already had a theme in mind before we were engaged.

When did you start your budget? Did you find the money conversations awkward?