How far

We started planning for the wedding over the summer, but didn’t get officially engaged until October when I came back to the states. I had a contract job with a higher pay that required me to live abroad, and all the extra $ and per diem was going to a separate bank account specifically for the wedding. We will marry in February, so that will be 9 months of saving up and paying my half of the wedding, dinner, travel, accommodations, etc.

View Quoted Comment If you don’t mind me asking how much do you get paid at your job? I have a job that pays me $15 an hour and I get paid every week and my wedding is not until May of 2021 but my family says I still would have enough money saved up to be able to pay off my wedding so I’m concerned if I should wait another year and save up

We are waiting about 18 months. Our venue has a monthly payment plan. We live/ will have our celebration in Indianapolis (15th largest city in the US, although it is the midwest— location plays a big part in costs of everything) We will be spending a total of $17,000. We have cut a lot of corners (I got my dress for $100). But we are also inviting 300 Is more than we had planned, but our choice of venue comes with a wedding coordinator, he has already made it worth every penny!!


The most important thing however is that you do what is best for the two of you!! If you are comfortable waiting awhile to save for a large wedding- go for it! If you would rather be wed sooner and have a smaller thing, do that!! It’s important to have a timeframe you are comfortable with and a budget that will not put you into debt or set up your marriage for hardship.

The best budget advice I ever heard was to take the amount of money you can save each month (after paying bills and putting some in your savings) and multiply it by the amount of months in your engagement. If you can save $500 per month after all extra expenses x 17 months left in your engagement would leave you a budget of $8500. This could be a decent amount depending on your location and guest size (I'd probably recommend no more than 50 people or so with that amount).

We got engaged 11/19 on our cruise and the Friday after we got back, we went to look at venues and booked one! We immediately started planning and set a date if 9/12/20


That being said, we do have decent jobs and have little expenses as Missouri has a low cost of living so we have about **** extra a month. I make 18.10$ an hour and FH makes 17.50$ an hour.
That being said, our extra money, we split in half, half goes towards savings for our house and other half goes to our wedding. We are having a low budget wedding ($4000-$5000) and are not having help financially from parents or family. I hope this helps you!

I saved up 10k in 3years but it wasnt for the wedding just building up my savings. Then we got engaged in April, didnt start planning until the end of June (lets just say we fully got engaged in june because at first we had some issues and didn’t talk about anything wedding related) and set a date for April 4th. Our budget was 10-15k wishing to stay around 10 but yea right that didn’t work out.

Im kind of glad it worked out this way. Im a doer so having a super long engagement would have probably drove me crazy. I like to get things done, check it off my list & on to the next. But as far as the money saving I saved 3k a year on my savings plan. Roughly $150/mo (sometimes more) and i saved all of my tax return which helped with the rest of the total. ^I meant to include in my reply

View Quoted Comment I think it depends on where you live. I live in LA so even if I get paid more than most on this thread, the cost of living is much higher so my savings is limited.


A good chunk of my wedding savings was during the summer cause my per diem was US$500/week. I would bring back lunch (which was paid for by the company) as dinner so I wouldn’t need to spend.
Our small wedding of only 10 will be a total of $25k, and I’m still saving my portion. I can’t wait for my part time teaching job to start cause that’s an extra income that will go directly to my wedding fund.

It really depends on your financial situation. We’re paying for the wedding entirely ourselves. Got engaged 1/1/19 and date is 8/22/2020. I got a promotion at work in March of 2019 which really helped our savings. I didn’t book anything until I had almost half of our entire budget saved. We live in Ohio and are spending about $5k on a 100 person wedding not including honeymoon. So far our budget is holding strong but I’m also a stickler about it.

I would recommend doing what Nicole said. Talk to both sets of parents to see if they are contributing, and see how much you can afford to save each month to come up with a budget. Then stick to it!

We got engaged on 5/18/19, started planning a month after. Only had a few savings prior to getting engaged, we were going to get married in 2021 to save more, but changed our minds and decided sooner. Our original budget was 25k (we live in the Chicagoland area), however we are now spending around 30k since our guest count increased to around 250 from 175. We’re paying for everything, but my mom will be gifting us 5k.

We used savings we already had, plus we were very fortunate that our parents both contributed. Our wedding cost about $20k (in NJ, but in the NYC metro area). At the time of savings/part of planning, I made $55k a year and my now husband made about $45k a year. We were engaged for 16 months total, but our original plan was to have a small elopement until our parents offered assistance, which was more than generous. We split the costs in thirds.

We had openly discussed marriage before we were engaged and had planned to start saving a year before we got engaged for a larger home. With that when he proposed in September we had enough saved for our wedding. Now we are saving for the honeymoon!