The Wedding Budget

Since it seems like a lot of people out in pdf bloggers’ land are getting married soon, I figured I’d do a post or two about our wedding. (We just had our 2nd anniversary this month.) So, how did we go about setting our wedding budget?

First, we decided that we did want a wedding instead of eloping. Although just going ahead and getting married in Kauai where he proposed would have been nice. But it was important to us to have our family present! Next, we decided on the date and time of day. Since we wanted to be sure to get great photos, we decided it should be during the day. That decision right there probably saved us thousands of dollars. Because it meant that whatever meal we served would not be a sit-down dinner. Then we (ok, mostly me) made a list of the things we wanted to have: formal wedding dress & tux, gorgeous cake, flowers everywhere you turned, live music, chocolate-covered strawberries, etc.

Now, we’d both been married before. So we had some idea of the cost extremes that could be involved in either direction. But instead of spending our time checking around as to what might be “appropriate” to spend or what we could “expect” to spend according to “the guidelines” these days, we sat down and decided what we WANTED to spend.

Our budget then became a matter of prioritizing and deal-making. I ranked the things we wanted in our wedding in order of importance (we both agreed that photography was number one) and went from there, allocating the budget accordingly.