Budget = ?? percentage of income

I just did the math, our budget is about 14% of our combined annual income. That being said it also includes gifts from both of our parents. We are contributing about half of the budget and already have that saved.

Ours is about 30% of our income. My dad and grandmother have given us a little money to help. Everything is so expensive :-(

Ours is about 38%. We already saved for it and I graduate this year and have already accepted a job so this works out.

We are at about 20%, but my parents are actually paying for all of it...or so they think. I don't feel comfortable spending that much of their money so with the exception of vendors (which my parents know the actual cost of) we are secretly splitting the cost and telling them I just got a really good deal.

Ours is high - 43% of our combined income. That being said, that includes extremely generous gifts from both sets of parents. Our own contribution is about 13% of our annual income.

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SO. EXPENSIVE. We blew our budget before we even started It's hard to come up with a realistic budget until you actually start getting quotes.

It is 15% of my income. FH is still in school. It does feel nuts.

View Quoted Comment Yes I had an original budget which was very unrealistic and then I had an edited budget that didn’t work either. I was definitely naive about everything that’s involved.

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Great that you have the savings already! We are setting aside a certain amount each month in a separate account so won't be shocked at the end! Still waiting to see how much our parents are willing to contribute, budgeting for 0. So when they do, it will be a nice treat!

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Great plan! Congratulations on graduation!!

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Good luck with that! Hope they don't see through it!! My mom always knows when I'm hiding something from her

View Quoted Comment That’s a great plan! We are a bit closer to the weddi f than you are (6 months out today!) so I think that’s a great way to approach it!

It's about 17% of our combined income...but of what we will have contributed personally is only about 5%.
My parents are paying for a huge chunk of it as they received an unexpected settlement that more than covered what they had anticipated being able to contribute.

View Quoted Comment Thank you so much.

I'm not sure what the stats are but when I was doing research previously the standard wedding costs $20K + depending on how big your wedding is, what you want, etc. I've never seen anything on stats on % of income.

We just set a budget on what we didn't want to go over, and went with that. $5k

I had more than half of that saved up for our wedding before we even got engaged (as we'd planned on originally getting engaged 2 years earlier and I wanted to be prepared because I know my FH wouldn't prepare for it, ha!). After that I tried to set aside $200 each paycheck, FH gave his entire tax return, I gave 1/2 of my tax return, and FH gave an additional $500...so we are ahead of schedule, thankfully. I was very happy that I planned ahead otherwise we would have been screwed.

At the time we felt that is what we could afford, and didn't want to spend more money than necessary. To tell you the truth I dint' even want to spend $5k.

In the end we will end up going over $5k, but it will also include the costs of our honeymoon so were not worried about it. Plus, we are expecting to come back from our elopement/honeymoon with unspent money..called SECRET SAVINGS in our house, ha! When I budget I always budget more so when we don't spend as much, it's called SECRET SAVINGS that we can put aside into our savings account or use to go out to dinner or movie, etc. Has saved us a great deal.

Just need to find what works best for you and your FH. Good luck!

We also had a year and a half to save from engagement to wedding. We have been putting aside 10% of our income in Portland Oregon. We were on track to stay on budget and then parents gave us a big chunk of money unexpectedly. So that probably almost doubled our budget. We could have done it on our own, but now we will have a more elaborate wedding weekend 🙂

Our is about 18% of our combined annual income but we got large gifts from my mom and FMIL, what we’ve put in is only about 3% (number may go up by the end of it, we’ve seen discussing adding in a bit more which brings us closer to 7%)

We'll be at about 10%. However, we got some very generous monetary gifts from my parents that will put us far under that - we definitely got lucky!

Sounds like most of our parents deserve BIG HUGS!!!

I really don't think a ton of people base it on that. Just because parents contribute sometimes, and a lot of couples don't combine finances so they contribute differently. Plus one person may make 200k combined but put such a large portion towards bills that they take home less than someone making 100k combined with no bills. My father is paying for our wedding (around $55k) and our combined income in our house for my fiance & me is around $120k, so technically by the % math we are spending 46% of our annual income on the wedding. But since my father is paying, he is paying closer to 10% of his annual income. So it really just depends on what you can save & what you are sacrificing. I don't think 20% is nuts, it just sounds like you are truly planning & setting a budget which is great!