Financial Planning - Setting a budget

When planning our wedding, the most important aspect was our budget we had a good idea of the things we wanted but had no idea of what they would cost. We knew what we could afford to save but had no idea if it would be enough, so where to start.

Well we simply divided our expenditure into the following categories

Wedding breakfast + evening reception venue
Church
Cars
Suits
Photographer
Cake
Florist & Room Decors
Table Decor
Rings
Stationery / insurance
Hair & Makeup
Dresses & Bridal
Secret (will reveal later)
Thank You Gifts & Favours
Honeymoon
Contingency Planning

These simple categories made planning our budget a lot easier and knowing how much to spend on each category kept things in perspective, we could spend a little more on bridal wear as we saved a little on the cake etc.

We then sat down and went through each category and decided how much we would like to spend on each item, any bride will give you a rough idea of the cost of the dress she wants, and with a little bit of research you can find average prices for things such as photographers, cars, florists etc and this average will be a good starting point for planning the costs of your day.

After putting a value next to each category it soon became quite clear we could not afford to get married, something had to give, we added everything up and the total of nearly £25000 was a lot more than we knew we could afford so something had to give.

As we were paying for this wedding ourselves we had calculated our monthly income and average monthly outgoings and allowed ourselves a fixed amount of savings of 1000 per month, and with a little over 18 months until the wedding day our 25000 quickly needed to become 180000.

We then made the decision to drop the honeymoon and reduce other outgoings to get our budget down to somewhere close to the 18000 it needed to be, it was sacrifices we needed to make not sacrifices we wanted to make.
We made the decision going in to debt for our wedding was not the way forward, having seen friends and relatives taking this approach we wanted to make sure that the day we get married we have as little debt as possible hanging over our newly married heads.

I will reveal as time goes on just how our budget has fluctuated, but primarily we have stuck to our guns and remained on budget as much as possible.