Wedding Bells: The Budget

I have never been a lover of finance or really anything maths-related, but one of the crucial things to work out before doing any other preparations for a wedding, is the budget.
Wedding budgets can vary massively and this will impact basically all of your other planning decisions, e.g. venue, number of guests, any music or entertainment, the honeymoon, etc...

The first step is to sit down with your future husband or wife and have a frank chat about where this budget is likely to come from. It could be savings, help from parents or donations from friends.
Then if you're hoping for some outside help, bite the bullet and have those conversations. It's always a bit awkward to talk about money, but just ask if that person would be willing to give anything towards the wedding and see what they say.
A way that a friend of mine thanked all those who had contributed to her wedding, was to allocate each monetary gift to something specific; this meant that when the couple wrote their thank you cards they could say that the money was used to buy the flowers/wedding cake/invitations.

Once you know the budget you're working with, my advice would be to sit down together again and create a spreadsheet that has everything you'll buy on it. I found Pinterest really helpful for this, as there are loads of checklists on there that help you to think through every part of the day. I also found it really helpful to ask a few close friends who had recently got married, what the breakdown of their budget was - once again, money can be a sensitive subject, so maybe have a think about who you ask!

Then go through each item on the spreadsheet, prioritising the most important things as we talked about in my previous wedding blog post, and put down a realistic budget for each of them.

Keep referring back to this spreadsheet with every purchase you make. Weddings can so easily become very expensive, so make sure you're keeping track of your spending and logging all receipts.

Also, if your wedding budget is small, don't worry! I have been to some absolutely beautiful weddings that have been done on a tight budget. In fact these have been some of the most creative and personal weddings I've attended, where every aspect of the day reflects the couple getting married. Sometimes the bigger the budget a couple has, the less personal the details of the day are. This is because not being able to just buy things forces you to come up with creative alternatives or make things yourself.

The point is, you can create a really special day no matter what your budget is. You just have to sit down and work it out, then stick to it!

Do you have any wedding budget tips?

Lisa x