Was your initial budget realistic?

View Quoted Comment

LMBO from family to everyone ever met is a big difference. My honey included all sorts of people he did not originally include. Its like really??

View Quoted Comment

I keep thinking I am missing something ..I am missing something!! lol. I am truly doing this thing bare bones though. No alcohol, no hotel the night before, no special car ride in, only 100 professional photos (way way less money), no favors, no special robes and hangers, no additional parties. Just the ceremony and honeymoon. LOL. Much cheaper that way =)

View Quoted Comment

I'm curious of your budget breakdown. You are killing it!!! Small guest list?

View Quoted Comment About 75-80 people. A lot of costs are not applicable for us. We are getting married in FHs parent's backyard, so no venue costs. I'm wearing my mom's dress, so no dress costs. Lots of friendors helping us as a wedding gift. Spotify playlists, so no DJ costs. Saving money wherever possible! Also, we are not using any actual wedding vendors, so there is no "wedding taxes" added on.

I had no idea how expensive everything was going to be. My fiancé and I “wanted” certain things for our wedding day and realized we wouldn’t be able to have them with the initial budget we had set. Now that we’ve had time to get quotes from different vendors, we’ve adjusted our budget and so far we’re on track. Some things are still costing more than initially budgeted for, but we’re reallocating our finances to make sure our wedding stays within budget.

We live in the Northern Virginia area (our county is the richest in the country). As two young adults who are under 26, both have student loan debt, and are trying to buy a house/have a honeymoon simultaneously, we are financing this wedding almost entirely on our own. We set our initial budget for 10K (a third of the avg cost of a wedding in our area) and an additional 2k for the honeymoon. Our budget has been really difficult to keep up with, but we're close enough to make me feel alright about it (about 1.5k over).

For a wedding of 75 people in the NOVA area plus a honeymoon in the States, we're looking at 13.5k. Honestly this is a worst case scenario as food costs will probably be lower after we get rsvps back, and we basically haven't had to sacrifice on anything we really wanted.

SUPER proud of FH and I for pulling this one off

Our initial budget was realistic for all the big things, but we did a lot of research before booking anything. We initially estimated $20,000 but we ended up spending around $28,000 for 118 people (not including the honeymoon, that was an additional $3,000). It would have been $32,000 if we had everyone RSVP "yes." We went way over budget on photography and had to cut videography. We were under budget on our cake, invitations, alterations and DJ. We were right on budget for flowers and my dress. It cost $2,000 to get married in our church, which was a bit unexpected. We spent a lot on food/booze but we didn't have a venue rental fee since we met the food/beverage minimum.

We didn't really set a budget only because we didn't know how much venues cost in our area. After we decided on our venue and were okay with that price I made sure I stayed in my ideas of affordable and budget-friendly vendors. May have gone a little over on flower budget but the cake was under budget. So I think things balance out. It basically came down to what we knew we could afford ourselves separate from what our parents were giving us.

So we originally said $14k but then FH’s family offered us another $2k so we raised our budget to $16k which was definitely more realistic... we definitely needed that extra 2k lol. We actually thought we were going to be way over budget because we invited so many people, but then we ended up getting way more declines than we thought (98 attending out of 148 invited) so we ended up being shockingly under budget! Then we were actually able to afford a videographer that I REALLY wanted, but had cut early on because we couldn’t afford it 😁

We have gone “over” a bit if you consider the things my mom has bought... she paid for my dress, my veil, my shoes, my flowers, and our cocktail hour musician. All in all she’s contributed about 1k, but I haven’t counted that as part of “our” budget because she told me from the beginning that she wanted to buy my whole attire and my flowers so I hadn’t even built those items into our budget to begin with (and then she decided she wanted a cocktail hour musician last minute so she just paid for that too haha). Other than that, we’ve actually stayed very close to our budget! Though had we not gotten so many declines, we would’ve been a few thousand over 😖

We originally thought we could have a wedding for around $5,000. HA, that was super unrealistic. Our wedding is costing around $13,000.

We're budgeting $20k for our wedding and if everyone shows up we'll be about $2k over budget. Which is normal because they always tell you to prepare to be over by at lease 10%.

Nope. I think I cried for the first week - sticker shock. I thought all in wedding / reception for 12k. We are at almost 20k.

I'm not that far in but budget is 10k. My friend had a larger wedding wedding for the same price, and I am for sure ordering less food, my mom is paying for the dress, we're using the same photographer I think. The venue is super cheap compared to everything I've looked at and comes with tables and chairs! I'd be surprised to go over budget.

We budgeted for $5,000. However, our venue is free. Were getting married at FH parents house outside. They own an extra 3 acre lot that is beautiful grass and oak trees. Its also in eyesight of the water.
Also, his parents surprised us and paid for our catering. We were initially going to just do sticky fingers which totalled $600 for everything. They surprised us by hiring and paying for a local caterer who is well known. I'm sure they're spending a little over $1,000 on that.
So, that left us with $5,000 for everything else. Depending on the weather forecast, we will either be about $500 under or about $1500 over. If it doesn't rain, we are just using a nice white canopy tent were purchasing to provide a little additional shade. However, if its going to rain were going to end up spending between $700-$1500 for a tent from rental company.

I started with the estimations WW automatically puts in, but quickly realized alot of those things didnt pertain to us. So, I diys some research and revamped the estimations for all items. If it was something we didn't need, I just put estimate at $0. Other items I researched their cost for what we wanted and then high balled the estimate. For example, if most the DJs I found were around $800, I would put $850 or $900 in the estimate box. Once we pay an item or know the exact amount, i change the estimate to that amount.

Our budget is about $13,000. We live in a semi-expensive area so we expanded our wedding venue search to 2 hours away from where we live and found a BEAUTIFUL venue 10 minutes away from FH's parents' house for a great deal! He's from a small town so all my vendors have been way cheaper there than if I had gotten married where we live! We're at about $7,500 right now and only have 2 more big vendors to book and a lot of smaller things to do. I've gotten to get several extra things I wasn't planning on getting just because everything has been so inexpensive.

View Quoted Comment Thank you!! That’s awesome they paid for the honeymoon. My mom offered to buy my dress ($1,200) which helped a TON!

View Quoted Comment I feel that!! I think it’s the guest count that really makes it expensive. More people = more everything!!

We had budgeted around $15k, thinking of keeping our guest count low to have a low total from the venue. Little did I know how much extra costs (photographer, DJ, dress, etc.) would add up! Also, with parents who keep adding to the guest list, we blew the budget for sure. My dad offered to pay 1/3 of the costs, which helps some, but I've estimated we just about doubled our costs overall.

I can't say that $10,000 is unrealistic because it is not. I could have made that work; a lot of my friends have and their weddings were beautiful. I am stubborn and had a vision and instead of fitting it into that original budget I added every little unnecessary thing I wanted to the list, figured out what I needed to make/ save in order for it to be paid off by this year (i got engaged at the end of 2017) and I worked doubles for over a year so the original budget was doubled. I can't say I regret it though lol,

Oh boy. I originally budgeted $20K but it's basically double that now. Whoops.