Our Best Advice for Budgeting for Your Wedding
We’ll be posting many blogs about budgeting for weddings, but in this post we want to convey the most important piece of advice that we’ve learned from watching many couples plan a wedding.
We find that the normal way to go about budgeting for a wedding is to start to do some research about the average price of each expense – venues, catering, photography, videography, the dress, etc., choose where you want to fall in the distribution (higher than average budget wedding, average budget wedding, lower budget wedding, etc.), and then scale the average prices based on that.
The problem with this is that you’re going to be setting everything in your wedding according to that one budget decision, and most couples only care really strongly about a few pieces of their wedding. That’s why our biggest piece of advice is to
choose what you care the most about and prioritize it in the budget.
That will look different for everyone. Some people really care about the food and will want to prioritize finding a phenomenal caterer. Maybe that means holding the event at a less expensive venue or spending a bit less on the decorations. Some couples really care about the quality of their photos and prioritize that over hiring a more expensive videographer. Some are the other way around.
For the most part, it really is true that you get what you pay for in the wedding industry. So choose what you really care about on your wedding day and budget for that first. Then let everything else that you care less about come into place around it.