It’s no secret weddings are EXPENSIVE. On average, couples spend $30,000-$40,000 on their wedding. Don’t let financial stress overshadow your Big Day. I explain how to build the perfect wedding budget in today’s episode. The earlier you start financially planning for your wedding, the easier it will be to create the perfect day without overspending or going into debt.
Remember, a wedding budget is the same as any other budget. The key is to assign purpose for every dollar, know your numbers, and check in on your spending. It is possible to have your dream wedding without losing track of your money goals, and I am so excited to share how to make it happen!
During the episode, I touch on wedding budget best practices such as:
[01:45] Creating a starting budget
[06:45] Making time to get real numbers
[09:32] The importance of a budget buffer
[10:26] Planning where the money is coming from
[11:55] Tracking actual expenses vs. projected budget
Tune into this episode of Money Files to learn how to build the ultimate financial guide for wedding planning.
Are you ready to start asking for help with your finances? Apply to work with me, and let’s start working towards your financial goals.
IF YOU LOVED THIS CONVERSATION ON HOW TO BUDGET FOR A WEDDING, CHECK OUT MY EPISODE ON ESTABLISHING A HEALTHY FINANCIAL DECISION MAKING PROCESS!
Transcript for “How To Budget For A Wedding”
Intro: Hi and welcome to Money Files. I’m Keina Newell from Wealth Over Now. I work every day with professional women and solopreneurs to help them get out of financial overwhelm and shame so they can experience more flexibility and ease with their finances. Are you ready to gain confidence and learn to manage your finances intentionally? Tune in and grab financial tips that will help you master the way you think about and manage your finances.
Keina: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Money File. So, today I’m actually going to be talking about planning for a wedding. Someone who follows me on Instagram asked me if I had an episode about planning for a wedding and I didn’t really have one that I could send to her. So I was like, you know what? I’m going to record an episode just for you so you have the information to plan your wedding. But I know that if she has this question, you probably also have this question because I have worked with clients on actually planning their wedding and actually specifically worked with one client and we like really just helped narrow down what she was spending money on. She had like a micro wedding during the pandemic. And so, I think that if you start in advance, like this is something you can also plan for and it doesn’t have to be something that makes you feel like, oh my goodness, we’re going to spend so much money and then you just end up bleeding out money and you never had a plan to begin with, so you don’t know if you are like in range or out of range when it comes to thinking about whether or not you were in budget.
So the first thing that I would tell you to do if you are planning for a wedding is I want you to create a budget. And so when I think about creating a budget, this budget can really be separate from, you’ve heard me talk about budgeting on other podcasts and I think about budgeting in this case is like I would create a separate budget. So when I’m working with clients, like if they’re going on a trip, we’ll make a trip budget. If they are even planning for holidays, we’ll make a holiday budget and we specifically are just focused on this like one event. So it’s almost like you have your big budget, but then we’re like pulling this out because it’s something that we want to plan for specifically that doesn’t necessarily need to be in our budget.
I don’t want to say it doesn’t need to be in our budget month to month, but we want to get more granular with like what are we going to do with the money that we have or how much money do we need. So in this case, I would want you to be thinking about two things. One is someone gifting you money or do you already have money that you and your partner have talked about contributing? I think like that’s really important to know. So if you have a family member that said, hey, I’m going to give you $10,000 and you and your partner are going to put in $20,000, you have another family member that’s going to give you $10,000, well now you know that you’re working with a budget of $40,000, right? And I would assume like this is like cash that you actually have and or you know that you have the ability to be able to create. And so this is what I mean when I say like actually know your budget. So thinking about like what is the amount of money that you either have available to spend or that you want to spend?
The other way that you can think about this in creating your budget is to actually sit down and map out what are the costs going to be. You’re still going to map out the cost even if you have like gifted money, but if you’re like, oh Keina, I don’t know how much I want to spend, that’s another way that you could be thinking about is just to go in and map out costs because there’s going to be a number that you probably get to and you’re going to say, I don’t want to spend $50,000. I’m comfortable with $30,000, but I’m not comfortable with $50,000. And before I recorded this podcast, I actually looked up the average cost of a wedding and it was somewhere in between. It was like kind of state dependent, but somewhere in between like 30 and $40,000, right? So, I’m not using these numbers just as fake numbers. I know that this is like can be the cost of a wedding and even more when you live in a high cost of living area.
So after you know your budget, whether it’s a number, we’re just going to start from with it being a number, I actually want you to like open up a spreadsheet and really write down what your budget is for the wedding. And so the thing that I was thinking about is being able to kind of break your budget down into three categories. Like, thinking about leading up to the wedding, like what are your expenses going to be? What are your expenses the day of the wedding, and what are your expenses after the wedding?
And when I’m thinking about like leading up to the wedding, you’re going to have your dress, you have rings, you have a venue, you have engagement photos, you have makeup, you have hair. If you’re asking your bridesmaids in a special way to be a part of your wedding, like, that can all go into your bucket of things leading up to the wedding. Like if you’re thinking about the rehearsal dinner, right? Like thinking about those expenses, thinking about the venue, those could be things. And you could just, honestly, if you don’t know the prices right now, I just want you to brain dump everything. Then think about the day of the wedding. What do you need the day of the wedding? And so, you could be thinking about gifts, maybe you’re going to get your partner a gift, you’re getting your parents a gift or you want to get the bridesmaid or groomsman a gift. And so, thinking about those costs that are going to be associated with the day of the wedding.
There could be a wedding planner, there could be transportation, there’s going to be more makeup and more hair. There’s going to be food. And so, thinking about like how did those things fit in the day of the wedding, right? And then lastly, thinking about what’s going to be happening after the wedding. So I want you to think about your honeymoon. What do you want to do for that? Are you planning a trip with your significant other? Is there any like additional court paperwork that you need to fill out? What does your thank you cards look like? Are you guys going to have any moving expenses? But really just to kind of break it down in three chunks for you. And the reason I’m asking you to think about these three chunks is because it’s going to help you think about the expenses in three different buckets, which is going to craft you getting a somewhat realistic ballpark for how much you’re willing to spend on your wedding or whether or not you were going to be over or under the budget that you set for yourself.
So once you have these three areas set out, the thing that you can do next is like actually block out time to get real numbers. If you have a specific venue in mind, if you have transportation in mind, you can get some real numbers, you can Google and get some numbers. But I would also suggest like the high ticket items that you definitely call and probably get a range for what that could be, so you have a ballpark of where you’re going to be. And also just know before you go into the conversation, thinking about how much you’re willing to spend as you are crafting your budget, the other thing is, and this is something I love to do in general and why I say like talking about money just doesn’t have to be about how much debt you’re in or how much money you make, is that if you have friends, especially your friends are in wedding season is, ask them about what other expenses did they not include or think about when they were getting married. And that will like alert you to start putting some other things into your budget, right?
Like if you’re like, oh, I didn’t think about the fact that we wanted to get gifts for our parents, so like, let’s actually think about that, or I didn’t think about tipping the DJ and let’s make sure that we have money for tips. Like, that’s something that you could think of in the day of the wedding is that you wanted to have tips for people. And so really just thinking about what’s that overall experience that you want and being able to write that out in a spreadsheet so that you can easily calculate what would be the budget for your wedding.
The next thing is like after you’ve written everything out, you are potentially going to have a number you love or a number that you aren’t in love with. Regardless of where you are, I want you to go through and like audit your wedding budget. And when I say audit your wedding budget, I want you to think about like what are your non-negotiables for that day? And so if you are thinking about expenses that you are okay with trimming, what are those expenses that you’re okay with trimming; you’re going to be able to figure that out when you actually think about like your non-negotiables. Are your non-negotiables is a photographer? Are your non-negotiables flowers? Are your non-negotiables food? Are your non-negotiables the venue or the dress or the rings? But being able to know what your non-negotiables are, are going to help you to be able to audit your wedding budget.
The other benefit of going through this process, and I know this from friends getting married, is like as you start to look at the numbers, you can decide, like, do I want to do a destination wedding or do I want to do something that’s closer to my family? Because sometimes you may have a thought that one thing is going to be cheaper, it’s going to be less expensive, and maybe that’s not actually true. So, taking the time to go through the numbers is going to create more of a reality for you so you can make decisions from that place.
The third thing I want you to do is in your budget, I would suggest leaving like a 15 to 20% buffer. So if you are going to, and I’m just going to say that you’re going to spend $10,000 on your wedding just because it’s a number that I can easily do math on right now, if you are going to say that you wanted to spend $10,000 on your wedding and you were going to put aside 20%, it would be just leaving $2,000 for those expenses that you might not have accounted for. And so, that can give you a little bit of room to be able to float for the things that you may not have considered as you were planning. And so, it’s making sure that you’re not going up into the last dollar in your budget and you haven’t thought about those little extra things.
So, now that you have your budget, you have it all laid out, you have created your budget, you’ve audited, you made sure that you had a buffer in your budget, the next thing you need to come back and do is actually make sure you have a plan for where this money is coming from. So in the example I gave earlier in the episode I said, you could have $40,000, you know, $10,000 is coming from two family members and then maybe you and your partner are going to contribute $20,000. You may have that $20,000 already saved or it may not be saved, right? And so, if it’s not saved, now we need to think about how are you going to save or contribute $20,000 to your wedding and actually establishing a plan for that.
So if you guys are both saying we’re going to save $2,000 a month, we have 12 months into our wedding, then you and your partner need to know if you have combined finances that you can actually save $2,000 a month. Or if you have separate finances and one person is contributing $1,200 and the other one’s contributing $800, that we just need to have a plan for where the money is coming from to help you close the gap on that $20,000 you’re going to save. And so, I would suggest that if you have a plan to save the money for your wedding, that you actually put that money into a separate savings account so that money is automatically there. You can see it, it’s the money that you can use to put deposits on venues, it’s the money you can use to put deposit for the makeup artiste. Like, you’ll be able to see that that money is there and it’s available for you, which brings me to the last point.
As you are planning for a wedding, there are deposits that are required, and so sometimes what can happen is, you don’t remember that money and the money that you have spent early on, and so, yes, you have a budget, but you don’t just want to have a budget. You want to make sure that as you are actually planning your wedding that you account for actual expenses versus your estimated expenses. So having a system to be able to track that and knowing we said we were going to spend $500 on alterations, it was really a thousand dollars. And so being able to pay attention to those things, so you know, whether you are on or off track in your budget, I don’t want you to use your wedding budget account and just be looking at the balance and saying yes to things, but not being able to monitor how you’re actually spending your money as you prepare for this day.
So, thank you so much for listening. Some of you are, this may or may not even apply to you, but I just wanted to definitely give my perspective here for one of my Instagram followers that was asking me about if there had anything to plan for a wedding. And so, I just wanted to share this with you. I think all budgeting is the same is, and when you have the skill of budgeting, what helps you is the fact that you’re able to look at numbers differently. You know, like even in planning for a wedding, like what happens when clients work with me in planning for a wedding, you know how to give every single dollar a purpose. And so, you’re going to be able to have a really clear head and be able to think about, okay, what expenses are coming up, where is that money coming from? And you just won’t be swiping a credit card and hoping for the best. So, thank you so much for tuning in and I look forward to talking to you next week. Have a good one.
Outro: Thank you so much for listening to Money Files. If you’re ready to take the next step to reach your financial goals, head to www.wealthovernow.com/appointment and let’s get started.
