How to make a wedding budget

LOVE is all you need

(but a solid wedding budget comes in at a close second place)

Money is a very intimate topic. Having someone you barely know ask you questions about money is not only uncomfortable for you but also for the person asking. Whether you’re looking to buy a condo or a car, big ticket spends call for conversation about budget and feasibility. For any transaction of this scale, it has to make sense for consumer and vendor.

Weddings are no different. An additional challenge of wedding planning and wedding budgets is that there typically are multiple wedding funding sources. Depending on each situation, money can be coming from a variety of different combinations and percentages from married parents, divorced parents and the couple themselves. The nature of these ‘behind the scenes’ relationships adds more intimacy and difficulty into this important beginning conversation. Unfortunately, we live in a world that loves to label and nobody wants to be judged by how much they’ve set aside for what. We totally get that.

That being said, it’s like the inevitability of the ‘birds and the bees’ conversation…it has to be had so that everyone can have necessary information to make good choices. The wedding budget influences just about everything in the wedding planning process.

Here are ways to get started thinking and discussing financial commitments amongst not only the couple but all other parties contributing to the wedding budget, prior to beginning actual planning:

1). What is your overall wedding budget?

2). Are there costs being covered by other people? If so, what are they and by who?

4). What are the driving forces for your wedding day? (must-haves vs. nice-to-haves)

5). What is the 'style' of your wedding & how elaborate or detail oriented do you want your day to be?

6). Who should payment reminders and/or invoices go to?

7). Who is approving orders or spends?

With multiple funding sources, sometimes the best idea is to get a financial commitment from whomever and ask to have that money transferred into an account you create to merge funding sources, and from which all your wedding costs will be managed and paid from.

This alleviates having to go back and ask for multiple checks, possible tension between multiple or divorced households, changing financials and employment circumstances.

If you can start the planning process with all contributing sources merged, planning will be that much easier and enjoyable for all. 😊

Here's a great website to let you plug in all your details to get an estimate of the wedding your planning:

http://tinyurl.com/costofwedding

We hope this helps make everything a little bit easier :-)