Congratulations on your engagement! After announcements and the celebration, it is time to get to the grind of wedding planning. After our feet get grounded in the idea, the number one question is about where to begin. Planning a wedding begins with a wedding budget. A budget sounds like a minuscule and less exciting part of the adventure, but a wedding budget is the foundation to the entire event you are planning.
Creating a Foundation
The price of the dress and number of guests all come down to the wedding budget. Whether we like it or not, the wedding budget will make many decisions about the wedding day. Sometimes the biggest challenge when it comes to planning is creating the budget. The trick to having an extravagant wedding on a smaller budget is all about how you make your dollars work.
Creating the Wedding Budget
Many of the reasons surrounding the challenge of creating the wedding budget are related to the lack of surplus of funds. When we have a very limited surplus, it is time to look at current spending. There are many apps designed to track spending. Some of those are free; however, some come with yet another monthly subscription. Most checking accounts have tools within the banking phone app that can assist you with setting up a plan for budgeting and tracking spending.
After a careful analysis of spending, it is easy to see where we can shave off the monthly Netflix subscription, cancel that Apple Music plan that we barely use, cut out the restaurant spending, make the coffee at home, and probably change twenty other spending habits. Just the expenses mentioned could probably put a couple hundred extra dollars in your pocket every month. Once you tighten the reins on spending, it is time to open a savings account to start funneling the surplus into your wedding budget.
Make Your Budget Work
A new question begins to develop at this point. Couples start to wonder how much they should save. There are a couple ways to answer this question. Let’s put tradition aside for a moment and look at the facts. More and more couples are paying for their own weddings. Even when family members are pitching in to share the cost, weddings can become expensive. The average cost of a wedding in the United States is just over $30,0000. Your wedding budget does not need to meet that average to have the dream. A smaller budget should not mean less.
Begin with the essentials. Find your dream wedding dress and write down how much you want to spend on the dress. Write down the amount you want to spend on the limo, the catering for your guest count, bouquets, photography, wedding deejay and officiant. By now you will have reached a number that you can play with. However, you are not done. There are additional costs, such as the wedding venue and reception hall, centerpieces, tables, chairs and décor. The wedding venue, wedding furniture and décor can take up most of the wedding budget, if you let it. There is a way to avoid this very common wedding budget mistake.
Crystal Ballroom at Sunset Harbor
Couples are catching on to a new concept found exclusively at all-inclusive wedding venues. Having an all-inclusive wedding venue keeps the cost down while sparing nothing in the process of creating a dream wedding. Where we end here is where we should begin with the wedding budget. This simply means that you should always begin your wedding budget with a tour of an all-inclusive wedding venue that can provide the venue, décor, linens, flowers, tables, runners, chair sashes, centerpieces and all the fine china to stage your wedding from ceremony to reception. This everything included concepts will help you make important decisions about the rest of the wedding budget. Crystal Ballroom at Sunset Harbor is an all-inclusive wedding venue with an in-house design team and relationships with local vendors to make planning the fairy tale on a wedding budget an absolute dream.
