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Wedding Budget Starter Guide Thanks for reading our Wedding Budget Starter guide. In the following page we

go through deciding on your budget, creating an estimate of the individual costs,

and getting you plans to match your budget. We’ve included some of the

highlights from our e-book, The Real-life Wedding Planning Guide, to give you a

taste of the handy info we have to help you plan your own wedding.

As part of this guide you can also grab your FREE wedding budget spreadsheet,

so you can really get organised! You’ll need to sign into your Google account to

be able to edit the spreadsheet. Once you’ve done this just visit the link below:

Wedding Budget Spreadsheet

This should open the spreadsheet in Google Sheets. Go to the file menu and

select ‘Make a Copy’. You can then enter a new name to save a copy to your own

Google Drive. You are now free to edit your copy and start planning your

wedding!

If you have any questions or feedback, we’d love to hear from you – we’re here

to help.

Happy planning!

Dean & Hannah x

Founders of Own Your Wedding

www.ownyourwedding.com

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Own Your Wedding THE REAL-LIFE WEDDING PLANNING GUIDE

Copyright © 2015 Hannah Hammond-Scott and Dean Scott

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or

used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the

publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

First Edition

Although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure that the

information in this book was correct at press time, the author and publisher do

not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage,

or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions

result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.

The material in this book may include information, products or services by third

parties. Third party materials comprise of the products and opinions expressed

by their owners. As such, the author and publisher do not assume responsibility

or liability for any third party material or opinions. The publication of such third

party materials does not constitute a guarantee of any information, instruction,

opinion, products or services contained within the third party material.

Publication of such third party material is simply a recommendation and an

expression of the authors own opinion of that material.

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Wedding Budget Starter Guide DECIDING YOUR BUDGET

It’s vital to be realistic with the budget you set yourselves for the wedding. There

will be many temptations to spend, spend, spend as you go through the planning

process, and without a clear budget it may be difficult to resist. You certainly

don’t want to be forced to borrow money just before the wedding to cover the

excesses you’ve racked up - burdened with extra debt isn’t the ideal start to

married life.

The key thing with deciding on your overall wedding budget is identifying where

the money is coming from. Perhaps it will come from:

Existing savings

Savings yet to be created

Family funding part or all the wedding

When deciding on the amount you will spend, you should consider the bigger

picture. Yes, your wedding day is important, but weigh the cost against other

things you want and need to do after the wedding. For instance you might want

to buy a house, so would it be better if you spent a bit less on the wedding now

and were able to buy your new home sooner as a result?

To give you an example of a wedding budget, a survey conducted by Brides

Magazine in 2014 found the average wedding costs for their readers was about

£24,000 ($37,000). Yes you read correctly- that’s twenty four thousand pounds

which is a huge amount of money!

But the truth is, you don’t need to spend anywhere near that to have an amazing

wedding day that you’ll remember for the rest of your lives. We set our budget at

£10,000 ($15,500), which we took from our savings. There wasn’t a great deal of

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science behind this decision - it felt about right based on what we had available

and from what friends had spent on their weddings.

In case you are wondering - we came in at £10,535 ($16,000). Pretty close, but

still slightly over. It’s surprising how much the last few bits creep up on you, so

it’s important to have a little bit of contingency to cover this. You can see the

full breakdown of our budget in the free wedding budget spreadsheet on the

D&H Budget Example sheet (see the introduction for a link to get the

spreadsheet).

FIRST DRAFT BUDGET

It’s all very well setting a budget, but the hard part is keeping to it. So it’s time

to start adding up the individual costs to see how this total compares with the

budget you’ve decided on. You could begin by using the blank sheet in our free

budget spreadsheet, or take a look at our budget example for an idea of the

individual costs to consider.

It can be very tricky to estimate the individual costs at this early stage - after all

there are still so many options. But it’s a good idea to write a list of all the things

you think you want to include with an estimate of their cost.

Some of the main items will be fairly obvious; here are some examples of things

you might include at this stage:

Wedding rings

Wedding dress

Bridesmaids dresses

Grooms suit

Groomsmen suits

Church hire

Registrar’s fee

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Venue hire

Food and drink

Gifts and favours

Wedding car

Hair and makeup

Entertainment (band, DJ etc.)

Photographer

Flowers and decorations

Wedding insurance

Stationery (save the date cards, invites etc.)

There are obviously many other things you might want to include based on your

priorities, so just try to get them all in at this point. Don’t forget to include

smaller details such as invites or wedding favours as these add up quickly when

you start multiplying by the number of guests. Your budget is a living thing at

this stage, so it will inevitably change as you start to get in to more detail.

This can be a tough process because the chances are, like us, you’ve never

planned a wedding before so you have no idea how much this stuff costs. Best

guesses are fine to begin with as you can keep updating the numbers as you get

more detailed quotes. You can even base the estimate on how much you’re

prepared to spend - this can be a good way to rank each aspect based on its

importance to you. To start off with our estimates were based on some guess

work and a little research, you just need something to get you started.

The main aim is to get a rough idea of the total cost from your first draft

estimates. Try and be slightly pessimistic about costs - there’s no point trying to

kid yourself, and it’s a lot easier to deal with a budget surplus than a short fall.

Our first draft budget came in at an estimated cost of around £13,000 ($20,000),

so £3,000 ($4,600) more than the budget we’d set. This isn’t really a surprise as

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we included pretty much everything a typical wedding has, albeit at the mid to

low price range for most things. So this gives you some idea of how easy it can

be to reach that £24,000 average we mentioned earlier. If you find yourself in

this position, you have 2 options - either increase your budget, or you have to

start compromising.

We considered the first of these options, which is the most tempting - after all

it’s only another few thousand pounds more. But we realised this would reduce

our savings and prevent us doing other things that were important to us, such as

going on a honeymoon. So in the end, we stuck to our guns and our original

budget, we went back to our budget spreadsheet to see what we could change

for the second draft to lower the estimated cost.

SECOND DRAFT BUDGET

The best way to keep to your budget isn’t necessarily to just get the cheapest of

everything and haggle like crazy. It’s much better to concentrate the money you

have on the important things and simply chop out other stuff.

This is why it’s so important to write down your priorities for the wedding, or the

‘wish list’ as we called it. Then build your wedding around these and you’ll have

an amazing day. So, ask yourselves whether there are typical wedding things

that you don’t really care about that you can simply take out of the budget?

Here are some examples of the things we decided weren’t important for us, so

we were able to remove them or make compromises:

Wedding cake - with a custom baked cake costing hundreds of pounds, not

having a cake was one saving that was easy for us to make.

Bridesmaids – we didn’t have bridesmaid which could be controversial to

some brides but it wasn’t a priority for us. All our best friends and family

were still there. The dresses, shoes, hair, makeup etc. for a big group of

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bridesmaids can seriously add up. Although thinking outside the

traditional box can lower this expense.

Buying or hiring suits for the best man and usher –they all had nice suits

they could wear, although we did give them a fancy bow tie to match the

groom’s.

Wedding car - we had the ceremony and reception at the same venue, so

there was no real need to hire a wedding car and we asked the usher to

drive Hannah the short distance from home (luckily he had a really nice

car too).

Hiring a DJ or band for the evening - the budget didn’t allow for it, so we

made a playlist and borrowed some disco speakers from a friend instead.

Stationery (invites, table plan etc) - we made pretty much all the

stationery ourselves, not only saving a lot of money but also making them

very personalised.

These changes got us much closer towards reaching our target, and would still

leave us with a great day, focussed on the things we really wanted. We would

definitely recommend this approach - for us it was far better to spend a little

extra on, say the photographer, and just forget about the wedding cake. The

photos will be around forever, but the cake will be gone within 5 minutes.

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Thank You So Much! Thanks for taking the time to read our Wedding Budget Starter Guide; we

really hope you enjoyed reading it.

Following the advice we set out in the last couple of pages helped us

keep control of our budget, so we’re sure it can help you to as you plan for

your wedding. Also, don’t forget to get your free copy of our wedding

budget spreadsheet which accompanies this guide.

This guide includes some of the highlights from the budget chapter of our

e-book, The Real-life Wedding Planning Guide. The e-book contains the

lessons we learnt as we planned our wedding. So if you liked this guide,

why not find out more about the e-book by clicking here.