Brides with an unlimited (or very high) budget

I am luck enough to have my parents and grandparents paying for my wedding (oldest and only daughter and oldest and first grandchild to marry). We didn't discuss a budget but I wanted to keep things simple and on the lower end of the scale. I'm a coupon person and a bargain hunter, so I did the same with wedding planning. We knew what kind of venue we wanted so we scheduled tours and went with the one we both liked the most and was a fair price. We did just this with every vendor. I have a wedding binder where I keep EVERYTHING. lol. I have little tabs to separate for each thing (like Venue, DJ, addresses, Etsy purchases etc.) I also keep track of payments, final due dates and have a to do list in there. The only thing we really "splurged" on was having an open bar instead of open beer and wine. Pretty much every wedding we go to is open bar and we wanted to have the same since our friends are drinkers. Other then that I've gotten deals on things and am DIYing almost everything I can.

We don't have an unlimited budget, but my parents both chipped in a bunch, and FH and I are both pretty established and could afford a high budget wedding ourselves if we wanted it. For me, I considered prices and tracked spending the whole way (I have a bunch of excel spreadsheets that I constantly update). We definitely shopped around, but if there was something we really wanted and the price seemed justified, we weren't afraid to go for it. For example, we looked at a ton of photographers, and the one we ended up choosing was more expensive than average. But we're getting two photographers for the whole day, and that's totally worth it for us. Conversely, when we looked for DJs, we just wanted someone with some experience and enough PAs and amps, so we went with a local guy we kind of know instead of getting someone more expensive who has tons of lighting and extras.

Overall, for us, it wasn't as much about saving money just to save money, but saving money to put it somewhere else. So we saved some on our DJ and flowers, and in exchange got a better caterer than we planned to.

My family actually offered a decent amount of money. I simply couldn't justify spending that much money on basically a glorified party though. Food is where most of my budget is going and honestly it's what I'm most excited for. Being able to pick food I like specifically to my taste is a big win for me! 🤣

Our parents offered money but we didn't take any of it. We could have definitely spent more than we did but we didn't feel the need to nor want to spend such an exorbitant amount. Food is also where most of our budget went to and it was a good choice because we got tons of compliments off our wedding food.

We had a "budget" using the term loosely. We didn't want to spend over $60,000. The only things we "saved" with was not doing a full plated meal (we still would have gone with the same caterer though - we did a plated salad and buffet dinner instead), not hiring a $7,000 videographer (went with a $2,500 videographer), and having our photographer for 8 hours, not 10 (ended up being more than enough). I guess we would have covered stuff like hotel for wedding party & more gifts too but we got them quite a bit.

I didn't keep perfect track of things like invites & decor, but payments to vendors I kept track of on Google Sheets just to know what we still owed. So I know what we spent on major things like venue and vendor but not smaller things like gifts, invites, menus, decor, etc.

We splurged on the venue, my dress & veil, transportation for everyone including our guests, our hotel suite for the wedding weekend, full open bar, champagne toast, florist, beer donkey, favors, nicer food, etc. What ended up being the best was our DJ who wasn't even a splurge. The open bar & food were great too!

I just emailed the top 10-20 vendors in every category in my area and picked our favorites.

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Sounds like you were super considerate of your family's generosity! Bargain hunting is a great quality to have during wedding planning for sure.

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Great way to think about budgeting! "Conscientious Just Go For It!" Going to steal that motto

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Were you worried they would have too much input if you accepted? I hear that that is often a big issue! Food is our #1 priority too!!

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We are on a similar route. I'm not keeping track of the smaller items... I don't even count my dress part of the budget! I think we just honestly don't want to know the total at the end! haha. Planning for 18 months helps because things have been very spread out. Love the beer donkey!! I remember seeing in your pics, what an awesome idea.

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I didn't either, how funny! Yeah we had 19 months to plan. For us it was less about price and more about how good their reviews were.

We had around a $100k budget. My wedding planner told us what percentage should be allocated to each thing so that helped but a lot of smaller things we didn’t really worry about or count. We live in an extremely expensive city though so that budget didn’t go as far as you would think.

View Quoted Comment My brother's girlfriend is from Carmel, so very familiar!! I'm hoping they get married there, so gorgeous. We live in DC, so while we are hoping not to hit that mark, good chance it will be on the not so distant horizon

View Quoted Comment Aha they still were super opinionated anyway even though we paid it ourselves. I think it's because so many of their guests were invited they were worried it'd reflect badly on themselves. For food we upgraded our menu to a premium choice also because we weren't happy with the standard one so that definitely put us over budget in addition to us buying more alcohol. So the food and drink was really what got us over budget.

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We are excited about the food too! Hopefully us brides have time to eat What is your menu like? Dish you are most excited for??

View Quoted Comment I got a taco and pasta buffet. With w nacho bar for cocktail hour. I'm going to eat myself silly 🤣

We discussed budgets only after narrowing down the venues so we would have an idea of what our final bill would look like. Our parents offered to contribute as well so this lowered the amount we would have to pay ourselves. We had a lot to work with.

We chose our favorite vendors and compared pricing just to make sure their rates were reasonable. WeddingWire's budget breakdown and planning checklist were super helpful for us, and I'm just Type A enough to have a separate spreadsheet for all our expenses. Looking at it, we would frequently have moments wondering why we were throwing so much into one party.

We were able to have the wedding we wanted, but didn't spend more just because we had a higher ceiling. (My dress was significantly under budget, but I loved it!) It just gave us the breathing room to not stress too much over the financial part of wedding planning.

We don't necessarily have a budget, which is nice, but my mom is keeping track and I have a loose tally. We live in DC as well and are getting married in Philadelphia so we are trusting our planner and venue to give us the honest and straightforward advice about our vendors and who they recommend. We splurged on our venue, our photographer and our band. We want to make it the best we can for our guests and have the best memories possible of it.

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Allyson, we are also getting married on the same day!! We splurged on a band too, my FH was adamant about having a horn section Wish you were getting married local so we could compare vendors. I'm also wearing a Maggie dress!!

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I showed friends my spreadsheet and their eyes popped out of their heads! Type A's love their organization My dress was surprisingly less than I thought I'd be spending as well!

I was in between. I built my budget around what I wanted when I found out the cost. There were a few vendors I wanted no matter what the cost was.. this is how my budget doubled lol.