Budgeting Tips For Planning A Wedding
Planning a wedding can be chaotic, confusing and stressful, but sorting out the budget is a big part of taking away the stress and managing the whole process. We’ve teamed up with cashasap.co.uk, experts in short term loans, to bring you 5 practical steps to make budgeting for a wedding a whole lot easier.
5 Steps To Manage Your Wedding Budget
1. Make A List
One of the very first things you should do is make a list. Brainstorm and write down every single element of your wedding and get specific. Don’t forget to think about before the wedding and after, like where you’ll stay that night and the honeymoon. You could use a tool like Trello to make the lists, then you can easily move things around to different columns as they’re completed or dealt with.
Whether your wedding is going to be big or small, you will need to do this to make sure you haven’t forgotten anything. The list is going to be long! However, at this stage, you just want to write everything and anything down. You’ll start sorting it later.
2. Sort By Cost
Once you’ve got your list, you should then note down whether, on the whole, each thing is cheap, moderate or costly. For example, the venue is probably going to be pricey while the decorative bunting might be cheap! This will be really helpful when it comes to stage 5. Assign a category for everything from the small to the big things. Before you can note down all of your costs, you need to know what your wedding budget is going to be like. Budgeting is so important for a wedding – no one wants to start married life with a debt. It’s vital that you know what your figures are before you get started. Pigly.Com has all the calculators that you could need to manage your budget effectively. Weddings are expensive if you want them to be, but they don’t have to be over your budget if you’re smart about the way that you spend and save. When you know the most expensive items of your wedding, you can begin sorting how you plan to budget for it
3. Make Some Basic Decisions
At this point, there are some basic things you need to consider. Firstly, if you haven’t decided already, you’ll need to work out whether you want a big or small wedding, specifically in terms of the number of guests. This is going to be really important in working out how big your budget is going to need to be and how it’s going to be distributed.
You’ll also need to think about how much of a ‘homemade’, DIY wedding you want to have. Some people are happy to do a lot of the things themselves, making the table decorations or the favors, for example, while others wouldn’t want this at all. It’s worth thinking and talking about so you can consider it in step 5!
4. Family Gifts
Weddings are often a time when family members show their generous sides. It might be that you have family members that want to contribute financially to the wedding. You’ll want to take this into account when it comes to budgeting and when thinking about how you’re going to distribute your budget.
A lot of the time, family members might want to pay for specific things. For example, your dad might want to pay for the wedding dress or your uncle might want to buy the wine.
It’s important when you’re having these conversations to really clarify exactly what the person means and how much they’re expecting this to cost. If your parents say they want to pay for the wedding, find out if they have a budget in mind, whether they mean the whole thing, and what they’re picturing.
It might also be worth seeing if there are any caveats involved! They might be willing to pay for the wedding as long as they get to choose the guest list, for example. Make sure everything is really clear so you can make informed decisions about your budget.
5. Your Priorities
Once you have everything noted down, with the most basic guide to cost (cheap, moderate, costly), and you have an idea of how your family wants to contribute, you can start thinking about what your priorities are.
You can think big priorities — some people choose to prioritize the honeymoon over the reception, for example — but also your smaller priorities. How important is food for you? Or music? Use your cheap-moderate-costly list to see what things you might be able to move to other categories to make way for the things that are more important to you.
For example, you might have put both the photographer and the cake in the ‘moderate’ price category. However, you could then decide that having a great photographer means a lot to you while the cake doesn’t, so you can shift your budget so the cake will cost less and you can spend more on the photographer.
If you decided you’re happy to do a few DIY things, then put these next to some of the items on your list. What are your talents (or what are your family good at!) that you could utilize?
When you know where your priorities lie, you can start to decide where you want to place the emphasis on your budget: where you want to spend more and which things you’re happy to cut back on.
Following these five steps should help you to manage your budget in a way that suits you as a couple perfectly — without missing things out!
