wedding budget starter guide · bridesmaids – we didn’t have bridesmaid which could be...
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Wedding Budget Starter Guide Thanks for reading our Wedding Budget Starter guide. In the following page we
go through deciding on your budget, creating an estimate of the individual costs,
and getting you plans to match your budget. We’ve included some of the
highlights from our e-book, The Real-life Wedding Planning Guide, to give you a
taste of the handy info we have to help you plan your own wedding.
As part of this guide you can also grab your FREE wedding budget spreadsheet,
so you can really get organised! You’ll need to sign into your Google account to
be able to edit the spreadsheet. Once you’ve done this just visit the link below:
Wedding Budget Spreadsheet
This should open the spreadsheet in Google Sheets. Go to the file menu and
select ‘Make a Copy’. You can then enter a new name to save a copy to your own
Google Drive. You are now free to edit your copy and start planning your
wedding!
If you have any questions or feedback, we’d love to hear from you – we’re here
to help.
Happy planning!
Dean & Hannah x
Founders of Own Your Wedding
www.ownyourwedding.com
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Own Your Wedding THE REAL-LIFE WEDDING PLANNING GUIDE
Copyright © 2015 Hannah Hammond-Scott and Dean Scott
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or
used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the
publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
First Edition
Although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure that the
information in this book was correct at press time, the author and publisher do
not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage,
or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions
result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.
The material in this book may include information, products or services by third
parties. Third party materials comprise of the products and opinions expressed
by their owners. As such, the author and publisher do not assume responsibility
or liability for any third party material or opinions. The publication of such third
party materials does not constitute a guarantee of any information, instruction,
opinion, products or services contained within the third party material.
Publication of such third party material is simply a recommendation and an
expression of the authors own opinion of that material.
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Wedding Budget Starter Guide DECIDING YOUR BUDGET
It’s vital to be realistic with the budget you set yourselves for the wedding. There
will be many temptations to spend, spend, spend as you go through the planning
process, and without a clear budget it may be difficult to resist. You certainly
don’t want to be forced to borrow money just before the wedding to cover the
excesses you’ve racked up - burdened with extra debt isn’t the ideal start to
married life.
The key thing with deciding on your overall wedding budget is identifying where
the money is coming from. Perhaps it will come from:
Existing savings
Savings yet to be created
Family funding part or all the wedding
When deciding on the amount you will spend, you should consider the bigger
picture. Yes, your wedding day is important, but weigh the cost against other
things you want and need to do after the wedding. For instance you might want
to buy a house, so would it be better if you spent a bit less on the wedding now
and were able to buy your new home sooner as a result?
To give you an example of a wedding budget, a survey conducted by Brides
Magazine in 2014 found the average wedding costs for their readers was about
£24,000 ($37,000). Yes you read correctly- that’s twenty four thousand pounds
which is a huge amount of money!
But the truth is, you don’t need to spend anywhere near that to have an amazing
wedding day that you’ll remember for the rest of your lives. We set our budget at
£10,000 ($15,500), which we took from our savings. There wasn’t a great deal of
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science behind this decision - it felt about right based on what we had available
and from what friends had spent on their weddings.
In case you are wondering - we came in at £10,535 ($16,000). Pretty close, but
still slightly over. It’s surprising how much the last few bits creep up on you, so
it’s important to have a little bit of contingency to cover this. You can see the
full breakdown of our budget in the free wedding budget spreadsheet on the
D&H Budget Example sheet (see the introduction for a link to get the
spreadsheet).
FIRST DRAFT BUDGET
It’s all very well setting a budget, but the hard part is keeping to it. So it’s time
to start adding up the individual costs to see how this total compares with the
budget you’ve decided on. You could begin by using the blank sheet in our free
budget spreadsheet, or take a look at our budget example for an idea of the
individual costs to consider.
It can be very tricky to estimate the individual costs at this early stage - after all
there are still so many options. But it’s a good idea to write a list of all the things
you think you want to include with an estimate of their cost.
Some of the main items will be fairly obvious; here are some examples of things
you might include at this stage:
Wedding rings
Wedding dress
Bridesmaids dresses
Grooms suit
Groomsmen suits
Church hire
Registrar’s fee
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Venue hire
Food and drink
Gifts and favours
Wedding car
Hair and makeup
Entertainment (band, DJ etc.)
Photographer
Flowers and decorations
Wedding insurance
Stationery (save the date cards, invites etc.)
There are obviously many other things you might want to include based on your
priorities, so just try to get them all in at this point. Don’t forget to include
smaller details such as invites or wedding favours as these add up quickly when
you start multiplying by the number of guests. Your budget is a living thing at
this stage, so it will inevitably change as you start to get in to more detail.
This can be a tough process because the chances are, like us, you’ve never
planned a wedding before so you have no idea how much this stuff costs. Best
guesses are fine to begin with as you can keep updating the numbers as you get
more detailed quotes. You can even base the estimate on how much you’re
prepared to spend - this can be a good way to rank each aspect based on its
importance to you. To start off with our estimates were based on some guess
work and a little research, you just need something to get you started.
The main aim is to get a rough idea of the total cost from your first draft
estimates. Try and be slightly pessimistic about costs - there’s no point trying to
kid yourself, and it’s a lot easier to deal with a budget surplus than a short fall.
Our first draft budget came in at an estimated cost of around £13,000 ($20,000),
so £3,000 ($4,600) more than the budget we’d set. This isn’t really a surprise as
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we included pretty much everything a typical wedding has, albeit at the mid to
low price range for most things. So this gives you some idea of how easy it can
be to reach that £24,000 average we mentioned earlier. If you find yourself in
this position, you have 2 options - either increase your budget, or you have to
start compromising.
We considered the first of these options, which is the most tempting - after all
it’s only another few thousand pounds more. But we realised this would reduce
our savings and prevent us doing other things that were important to us, such as
going on a honeymoon. So in the end, we stuck to our guns and our original
budget, we went back to our budget spreadsheet to see what we could change
for the second draft to lower the estimated cost.
SECOND DRAFT BUDGET
The best way to keep to your budget isn’t necessarily to just get the cheapest of
everything and haggle like crazy. It’s much better to concentrate the money you
have on the important things and simply chop out other stuff.
This is why it’s so important to write down your priorities for the wedding, or the
‘wish list’ as we called it. Then build your wedding around these and you’ll have
an amazing day. So, ask yourselves whether there are typical wedding things
that you don’t really care about that you can simply take out of the budget?
Here are some examples of the things we decided weren’t important for us, so
we were able to remove them or make compromises:
Wedding cake - with a custom baked cake costing hundreds of pounds, not
having a cake was one saving that was easy for us to make.
Bridesmaids – we didn’t have bridesmaid which could be controversial to
some brides but it wasn’t a priority for us. All our best friends and family
were still there. The dresses, shoes, hair, makeup etc. for a big group of
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bridesmaids can seriously add up. Although thinking outside the
traditional box can lower this expense.
Buying or hiring suits for the best man and usher –they all had nice suits
they could wear, although we did give them a fancy bow tie to match the
groom’s.
Wedding car - we had the ceremony and reception at the same venue, so
there was no real need to hire a wedding car and we asked the usher to
drive Hannah the short distance from home (luckily he had a really nice
car too).
Hiring a DJ or band for the evening - the budget didn’t allow for it, so we
made a playlist and borrowed some disco speakers from a friend instead.
Stationery (invites, table plan etc) - we made pretty much all the
stationery ourselves, not only saving a lot of money but also making them
very personalised.
These changes got us much closer towards reaching our target, and would still
leave us with a great day, focussed on the things we really wanted. We would
definitely recommend this approach - for us it was far better to spend a little
extra on, say the photographer, and just forget about the wedding cake. The
photos will be around forever, but the cake will be gone within 5 minutes.
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Thank You So Much! Thanks for taking the time to read our Wedding Budget Starter Guide; we
really hope you enjoyed reading it.
Following the advice we set out in the last couple of pages helped us
keep control of our budget, so we’re sure it can help you to as you plan for
your wedding. Also, don’t forget to get your free copy of our wedding
budget spreadsheet which accompanies this guide.
This guide includes some of the highlights from the budget chapter of our
e-book, The Real-life Wedding Planning Guide. The e-book contains the
lessons we learnt as we planned our wedding. So if you liked this guide,
why not find out more about the e-book by clicking here.