Actual Cost of a Wedding

I was under on my dress, we budgeted $3000, and spent $1100. I was under on my DJ, I got the DJ I wanted with photo booth for $500! We budgeted $2000. We were also under on our venue, our venue included a cake (we had $200 for that) and were we able to get Sunday pricing for a Saturday night! Woo hoo! So we saved A LOT!
I’m over on photography, and over on added decorations. It’s hard for me to not try to add more things when we save money, I’ve got the perfect fiancé that keeps the finances in line, otherwise we’d have a million add ons that we don’t need haha.
My advice to you would also be to prioritize. We allotted the most money to alcohol, food, DJ...the party is what we want. We cut on flowers and favors and saved a lot by going with an all inclusive venue
Good luck!

My venue required us to purchase liability insurance and an alchohol permit- this added on an additional $450!! The venue itself is $800 so it is definitely our biggest expense.

We’re under 7,000 and wanted to spend less than 8k.
Idk how tipping goes. DJ will be getting a meal, and he owns the company so do I tip him? Photographer is also her own business so idk if I tip her? My bar is cash bar so my guests should technically be tipping... and servers not sure how to tip them yet... it’s all up in the air I guess

We stayed within our budget, and it was $50,000. We knew we wanted excellent food and booze, great music, and photos that will last a lifetime. However, when we set the budget we didn't include my dress, veil, shoes, and his custom tux, which then puts us at $58,000, we took those items out because we wanted to solely focus on planning for our guests and day of the wedding, I won't even add the wedding gifts we got each other. We're hosting an 80 person wedding in Downtown Chicago at a 5 star hotel on Michigan Avenue. We booked an award winning (WPPI) photographer and our engagement photos could have been in vanity fair so I can only imagine what our wedding photos will look like, a string quartet for ceremony and cocktail hour, and 6 piece live band for our reception. Cocktail hour, 4 course dinner with guest selection of steak or fish, 4 hour open bar, signature his and her cocktails, champagne toast, wedding cake, and late night stacks are included in our catering package. We're not religious so we are having the ceremony at the hotel, and it replaced the church ceremony and the potential lengthy time in between until cocktail hour when everyone is 'thirsty'. The nice advantage of a hotel wedding is the points you accumulate through their loyalty program! We'll have 10 nights of our 14 night honeymoon in Europe covered. One thing to keep in mind is that we are a bit older than the average bride and groom, me late 30s, him mid 40s and are paying for our wedding 100%. Weddings are a lot of money and working with any kind of budget, I can absolutely sympathize because it is so easy to find amazing ideas you want to incorporate from pinterest and then causing you to overspend. Luckily we wanted the same style and type of wedding, and already knew what kind of costs would be associated so no arguments during our planning phase! I work in finance, kept a very detailed spreadsheet to make sure we stayed within our budget, it was literally a part-time job! Good luck Brides!