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Creating A Wedding Budget You Can Afford
By Alan Allport
The most important part of planning a
wedding is setting your budget. Your budget is
important because it is next to impossible to know
what you can afford for each major part of the
wedding if you don’t set an overall cost that is
comfortable for you. You will probably find that
deciding the budget is the hardest job to do
because, of course, you want to have the best and
most memorable wedding you can possibly have.
The days when the wedding was paid
for by the parents of the bride are almost gone now.
Parents will often contribute to the wedding cost as
a gift to the couple, but it is pretty rare for
parents to cover the whole cost of the wedding.
Usually this is because the parents
simply can’t afford it. But couples today often
prefer to pay for their own weddings because it
ensures that they can plan them the way that they
want to without interference.
These days, 4 out of 5 couples pay
for their own wedding and it helps to know how your
budget should be broken down.
When creating your budget, you will
first begin with the overall amount that you can
afford to spend. The average wedding today costs
approximately $19,000. This is not a definite, but
this is what the statistics currently show.
Now you will need to take that
overall budget amount and split it percentage-wise
for each major aspect of your wedding e.g. how much
to spend on the wedding clothing, the rings,
catering, decorating the venue etc. If you are not
good at percentages, you can always utilize the
Internet and check with the various websites that
offer you free or cheap wedding budget calculators
that will do it for you.
With these calculators, all that you
have to do is input the total budget amount and then
they will calculate for you how much money in
dollars you will be able to spend on each component
of your wedding.
Once you have figured out the dollar
amount that you can spend on each component of the
wedding, you can then begin to create a list
itemizing everything.
You will need to put together a list
of all the areas of your wedding that are important
to you and make sure that you allocate a sensible
proportion of the total budget to each.
This is necessary so that you can see
if the wedding of your dreams is a realistic
expectation given what you can afford to spend. If
you come up short, here are some ideas to enable you
to trim the expenses:
• Reduce the size of the guest list
• Forego some of the services
• Reduce the size of the wedding
party
• Forget the extras like limos
It is only by setting down on paper a
budget you can afford and listing all of the areas
that you have to spend money on that you can begin
to refine your ideas on the type and scope of
wedding that it is realistic for you to aim for.
After all, you will have plenty of expenses to cover
after the wedding when starting out on your married
life together. It just doesn’t make sense to create
problems by over-stretching financially on the
wedding.
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