When it’s time to start organizing your wedding, you should be excited and enjoy the process. Although it can and usually will become stressful at times, if you have your end goal in sight, you’ll be able to get past any issues and create the most wonderful day that you and everyone there will remember forever.
One of the ways to make organizing your wedding less stressful is to have a good budget in place. If you can do this, you won’t have to worry about what you can and can’t pay for since you know the amount you have available. You also won’t have to worry about going over budget, as will be able to stick with the money you have. With that in mind, here are the best tips to help you create a wedding budget so you can plan without any concerns.
Take A Cash Inventory
In order to get a complete budget, you need to know where the money for your spending is coming from. To do this, you should take a cash inventory. In other words, look at all your sources of income. This could come from:
- Your monthly income (ideally combined with your partner’s)
- Savings
- Gifts or loans from family and friends
Although this might not look like too many avenues to go down, remember that your income can be made up of all kinds of things, and not just money from your main job. You might have a side hustle, for example, or you might decide to sell unwanted items and use the money to put towards the wedding. Once you have these main categories set up, break them down to see exactly what they bring in.
What Is Most Important?
Once you know how much you have to spend (that is, everything mentioned above added up, minus any essential payments, such as rent, food, and energy bills, for example), you can start looking at the different elements that come together to create a wedding. When you do this, you’ll find there are lots of things to think about and unless your budget is unlimited (or at least very large) you won’t be able to include them all.
The best thing to do is to think about what is most important to you. It might be that you want to avoid wedding catering disasters, so you opt to pay for quality caterers. Perhaps you have always wanted to get married in a certain venue, so that is non-negotiable. Maybe you want a wedding video as well as photographs. When you know what you must have, and you know the costs, you’ll then see if you have any money left over for any extra things. If you do, that’s certainly a bonus, but if you don’t, you’ll still have the wedding you always wanted.
Look For Ways To Save
Of course, it might be that your important elements won’t be covered by the budget you have worked out. You could then decide not to have them, but that might be a cause for regret. Instead, why not look for ways to save up the extra money you need to ensure everything is covered?
You could stop paying for subscriptions until after the wedding, for example, or, as we’ve mentioned above, sell unwanted items. Alternatively, you could move your wedding to an off-peak date in the fall or winter, and that could save you enough money to include all the elements you wanted.
