Any Tips?

My fiancée and I every Sunday we were putting $20 a piece into our wedding fund box for a little over a year and let me tell you we paid almost all of our vendors off just off that. Another thing I did was yard sales and sold things on Mercari and poshmark and all the earnings put it towards our wedding as well.

Cut out the personal splurges like Starbucks. That is probably easily $5 a pop. . .add that savings to your wedding budget. The other thing that helps is not seeing you money. See if you can automatically deposit a given amount from your paycheck into a savings account. When you don't see the money you don't spend the money. Before you know it your savings account will have an awesome balance! Pick up extra shifts/overtime if you can.


Keep in kind the big picture of having a budget double what you originally thought?

Best budget advice would be to figure out how much you have each month after paying bills and putting money into savings (this is really important so you don't have to go into the wedding savings!) to put aside for the wedding. If you have $1000 after paying all bills and expenses, I'd put 80% into savings ($800) and then the other 20% into wedding fund ($200). It may give you less money to work with for the wedding, but in the end, you'll not only have less need to dip into the wedding fund, but you'll probably have a better amount saved up for your life after the wedding.

My husband and I figured out what we could each contribute every month until our wedding date. We put that into a joint account.


We ended going over budget a lot but we’re ok with it, put it on credit cards, and paid it off in a few months.

So FH and I have separate savings accounts, and have been saving for our wedding separately. Once in a while we'll let one another know how much we've saved up in ours, so that we know where we're at.

I also have a savings app called Albert, that automatically takes $20 from my account every week, and I can also edit that amount and/or deposit a different amount whenever I want. I'm planning on keeping that as our fund for tipping vendors since that can add up a lot as well and I feel like a lot of couples forget to factor that into their wedding budget.

We opened a joint savings account and each contribute $300 a month. We also deposit any extra money into that account (i.e. tax refunds, birthday money, etc.). Especially with tax refunds and stimulus checks we reached our goal very quickly! Since you're wedding is so far away I'd recommend opening a high yield investment account. Those can grow even more than a traditional savings account. Just make monthly contributions you feel comfortable with and you should reach your goal in no time!

I personally had a separate wedding fund that i had a side gig job for. so that specifically paid for my half of the wedding

Kristen don’t beat yourself up, things happen.
I am not the most responsible person when it comes to money. Something that has helped me with saving for my wedding was taking a certain amount of cash out of the atm for my spending (so that I’m not just swiping my card because it’s easy to lose track that way), pay whatever bills I need to pay and then transferring the rest of the money to my savings for the wedding fund.
I find that preplanning my funds (as much as I can) allows me to be intentional with what I do with my money.

My best budget advice is to live well within your means. Most people don't.

Find ways you can save money (maybe its go out to eat one day less a week, prepping lunches or morning coffee at home, etc) and use that to add to your wedding fund. I typically put any "extra money" (if I work a gig and get some unexpected money, sell stuff on Poshmark, get a monetary gift, etc) right into savings. If you have a bill you are used to paying and it suddenly becomes less (you pay off your car loan, your insurance premium goes down, you get a discount for switching your wireless bill to paperless), budget the same amount towards that bill, and put the difference in savings.

I would also consider reading the fundamental principles of Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University (its got some religious overtones but you don't need to be religious to benefit from it at all). I took the course but recommended it to one of my coworkers (who is even more frugal than I am) and he just read about it online for free and has been following the steps and says its been hugely helpful.

So far there have been a lot of great ideas! You might want to look into putting your savings into a higher interest yielding account, like a money market. You could easily earn an extra few hundred dollars in interest.