KissMeGoodnight
eLearning Series: Cut Your Wedding Costs
Getting
Married? Congrats!
Hot Tips To Slash Your Wedding Costs
( 26 pages )
How
To Create Your
Wedding Budget
Perhaps the most
important thing that must be done when you are ready to begin
planning your wedding is to first create your budget. Your
budget is important because it is almost impossible to know
what you can afford for each aspect of the wedding if you
don’t give yourself a limit to the overall spending costs.
For most people, creating the budget is the hardest job to
do because you want to have the nicest and most memorable
wedding that you can afford.
The days when the wedding is paid for by the parents of the bride are practically
gone now. Parents will often contribute to the wedding cost as a gift to the
couple, but it is rather rare for parents to cover the whole cost of a wedding
these days.
Usually it 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 do it the way that they want to without interference.
A lot of the time, parents will forego paying for the wedding and pay for the
honeymoon instead. Basically, this makes creating your own budget very important;
especially if you are paying for both the wedding and the honeymoon yourself.
These days, 4
out of 5 couples pay for their own wedding and it helps to
know how your budget should be broken down. The chart below
should help.
Special Note: This chart is a general
breakdown of the costs and how much of your budget should
be applied to what. This chart was produced by www.BrideSave.com
if you would like to see more information.
As with the above
chart, when creating your actual budget, you should use the
chart information as a good starting point. From this chart,
you will next have to create your actual dollar budgeted
amount.
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 written in stone, but
this is what the figures currently show.
Next, you will need to take that starting amount and apply it to an actual
separate dollar amount. If you are not good at percentages, you can always
utilize the
internet and check with various websites that offer you free or cheap wedding
budget calculators that will do it for you.
With these calculators,
all you have to do is give it the total budget amount
and then it will calculate for you how much money in dollars
you will have to spend on each aspect of your wedding.
Once you have figured out the dollar amount that you can spend on each aspect
of the wedding, you can then begin to create a chart that will itemize the
list for you. I have included a quick table to help you out in this area.
What this table
is meant to show you is what needs to be done, but the blank
areas are designed as a means of bringing out the dream of
it all into reality. You have to make a list of all of the
things that you will need to get in order to fulfill your
wedding hopes.
This is necessary
in order to know if what you dream of can even be afforded
within your set budget. If it can’t, you will have to do
any or all of the following:
- Lower the guest
list
- Forego some
of the services
- Lessen the
wedding party
- Forget the
extras like limos
It is with a
budget that you can set realistic goals for your wedding
and whether or not your budget is realistic based on your
finances. If it isn’t, you will have to change or get rid
of something.
It’s that simple.
Once you have
decided what you want to include and what you can afford,
it is on to the planning stage.
 
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