Wedding Planning Budget - Essay Example

Here Wedding Budget After the excitement of becoming engaged, I faced the somewhat overwhelming task of creating a weddingbudget. Before my fiancé and I began any discussion of venues, cake choices or guest lists, the first thing we did was establish amount we were comfortable spending and resulted with a $15,000 budget. Amid the happiness over our upcoming wedding, our parents each offered us some assistance in planning this event, with the total of their contributions equaling $5,000. In starting our wedding planning process, my fiancé and I did the initial work of discussing what was important to each of us throughout this wedding event. While each of us wanted to ensure that our guests would have the best time possible, it was important to me to also make sure that we could get the most out of this as it is officially marking the beginning of our life together as a married couple. The key way in which we determined we could meet both of these objectives is to plan a personal, heartwarming wedding with the understanding that there would have to be a degree of modesty or simple nature to our planning. This will not be a celebrity-style wedding with all of the pomp and circumstance that comes with a grand or royal wedding but, a more organic and realistic representation of who we are as a couple while adhering to our specific budget parameters. With this in mind, we both agreed that the $5,000 from our parents would be kept separate from the wedding budget and placed into its own fund for a honeymoon as it is very important to each of us to be able to enjoy a week together to start our married life. Although it seems backwards to discuss this part of our wedding budget first, I am going to address how this $5,000 will be used right now so that I can keep this a part from the rest of the details regarding the wedding ceremony and reception. Honeymoon Budget - $5,000 With a designated sum of $5,000 for our budget, we chose a destination that would be easy for us to travel to and still have a considerable amount of this budget left over for lodging, food and entertainment on our trip. Due to my fiancé’s love of the ocean and the fact that I am familiar with Anne of Green Gables from Halifax, Nova Scotia, we decided to vacation there for our weeklong honeymoon. After an intense internet search of travel sites for the best deal, we were able to secure airfare and 7 days in a hotel for $1177.53 a person. Here is a quick breakdown of our budget: Airfare and Hotel: 2,355.06 Food: 700.00 Shopping: 1,000.00 Lobster Fishing Trip: 300.00 Misc. Entertainment: 200.00 Remaining Amount: 444.94 (The remaining amount can be saved for any unforeseen occurrences or charges during travel.) With the details of the honeymoon secured, I can now move forward to the more in-depth breakdown of the wedding budget for the remainder of the post. The budget will first discuss the expenses related to the ceremony and then we can move forward to the reception. Ceremony Budget - $5,000 Before defining a specific wedding budget, our first step was to identify a theme for our event. After discussing the pros and cons of each season, my fiancé and I decided upon a fall wedding for a few key reasons. First, we felt the temperatures would help ensure that our guests were comfortable and thus would help us not have to choose a venue with central air. This option would allow us to choose a larger variety of venues as well as have outdoor pictures comfortably. In addition, with choosing the fall, we determined that we will be able to use more nature elements as far as our centerpieces and other décor. Going this route for the look of our wedding will also ensure that we will be able to stretch our budget as much as possible to ensure the best event for the least price. For the remainder of this post, I will discuss each element of the wedding and reception after identifying the amount allocated within the budget for it. Ceremony Wedding Dress $1000 Bridal Jewelry $300 Hair and Makeup $200 Tuxedo Rental $100 Invitations $400 Postage $200 Organist $100 Aisle Runner $50 Candles $80 Glass Vases $100 Fall Flowers $500 Photography $1700 Total: $4730 Remaining Budget: $270 With the funds allocated, the ceremony will be a simple, yet beautiful one. After discussing what was important to us, the biggest splurge in our budget was the money designated for a photographer. We had discussed finding one our friends to do this but, decided that we wanted professional assurance that the photographs of our big day would be memorable and stunningly beautiful. We also allowed $1,000 for a wedding dress due to the fact that according to the Knot.com, alterations on a wedding dress often cost as much as the dress itself (2012). So, in reality, this amount really means a goal of spending around $500 on a wedding dress and $500 in alterations. Along with this knowledge when determining the amount for wedding dress, we also used the Knot.com to get information on how to make our own wedding invitations so we simply bought the paper and envelopes and printed them ourselves versus paying to have them made. The other expenses for the wedding are pretty standard for most traditional ceremonies – obviously the décor items were purchased to keep in line with our theme of a fall wedding. With the 300 invitations we sent out, we are expecting 600 people so, the bulk of our wedding budget is geared toward the reception for the food and drink component of the evening. Obviously with such a large guest list, we realized right away that planning our reception would center around our ability to have a good meal for everyone. Reception Budget: $10,000 Food $6600 Music $700 Décor $500 Cake $600 Venue Deposit $300 Photo Booth $500 Alcohol $600 Misc $200 Total Budget: $10,000 When determining how we wanted to distribute the funds for our reception, the first thing that became glaringly clear was that the food for this event was going to consume nearly our entire budget. While this was a concern for us, both my fiancé and I discussed that it was more important for us to have a large wedding with our big families versus choosing a more expensive location. With this understanding in place, we found a venue that was able to accommodate our large group as well as give us a deal of $11 per person for food for the reception due to the large number of people who would be there for the reception. After researching other cost saving measures for wedding planning, we also had the idea for a cheap alternative for our centerpieces by choosing to go to local farmer’s markets before the wedding and purchase pumpkins, mums and other fall flowers, gourds and plants to be showcased as the decoration for our reception as our theme is for all anyway. This option saved us an incredible amount of money in the décor for our reception tables as well as the head table. As far as our reception, our only real splurge was the inclusion of a photo booth for our guests to enjoy. This option would give our guests a personal reminder of our wedding as they could have fun pictures to take home of themselves from our big day. We will also get copies of all of the photos taken so, we could also see and remember the fun times people had at our reception. Aside from all of the planning surrounding a wedding and reception, my fiancé and I learned some key lessons about budgeting. The first thing we realized was the importance of being realistic. While we watched seemingly a hundred episodes of “Say Yes to the Dress” on TLC, it became apparent that spending $5,000 or more on a wedding gown was not an important detail to our big day. There were more important ways that those funds could be allocated to ensure that we would get the day we wanted for a budget that was affordable. Our largest concern was not to go into debt in having this wedding. Once we identified what our concerns were, we also over-budgeted when coming up with these amounts for our wedding, reception and honeymoon. While the amounts are as they stand to ensure we can afford to pay for everything, there is also the hope that some of these sums may actually end up being less than the amount we have designated for it. If this situation plays out, then we will come through this process with some money left over, which we can then use to whatever area we feel necessary. Most likely, any left over funds will end up going back into savings or toward improvements on our new home. Read More