Your wedding is an important day. It’s an undeniable fact. However, “important” doesn’t have to translate to “expensive.” Your big day will be a perfect moment in your memory no matter how much you spend. So why blow a big chunk of your future nest egg on a day that comes and goes so quickly?
A beautiful wedding does not have to cost a fortune. Planning a wedding with a realistic budget isn’t as hard as it may seem. There are a few simple wedding planning hacks that make it a breeze to budget a beautiful wedding.
Strategy Counts
The more detailed you get in your planning, the easier things will get. Decide early on in your engagement how much of your income you want to budget for your wedding. Also, plan out how much time you have to save it. Make a schedule of deposits in a designated account strictly for your wedding and stick to it. Determine if parents or other people are helping to pay for your wedding. If you can count on monetary help from a third party, or know there is some part of the wedding you do not have to worry about, you can adequately pinpoint your expenses.
Get Your Priorities Straight
Talk with your fiancé about all the things that make a perfect wedding. Find what you have in common and what each of you can and cannot live without. Write it down! When you know what you both want and need at your wedding, put everything in order of importance. Knowing what’s most important to both of you helps to make the budget much more straightforward.
Do Your Research
You can’t make an accurate budget if you don’t know how much things cost. You have to find out the costs of everything you plan to include in your wedding to save enough money to pay for it. Get more than one price for flowers, food, venue, and decorations. You will have a broad estimate of where your final costs will fall. Saving enough for your most expensive estimate will give you plenty of leeways.
Location, Location, Location
Where you have your wedding can have a significant impact on the overall cost. A large church wedding or a giant banquet hall can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Going for something smaller, such as a park or atrium, can be much less expensive. If the family home is available, it would be even cheaper. Look for something close to home but also central to most guest locations to keep travel costs low.
The Issue of the Dress
The wedding dress can easily be the most expensive purchase of the wedding if you let it. A pricey designer dress is glamorous and eye-catching, but there are myriad other ways to get the same effect at a fraction of the cost. Finding the right wedding dress store near you that has beautiful dresses at reasonable prices is important. Checking out as many different shops as you can will help you get a better sense of if a dress is overpriced or not.
Another way to keep this expense down is to utilize pre-owned dress. You really can’t get more glamorous than a family heirloom dress, for instance. Your mother’s or grandmother’s wedding gown could be all the rage this year with a bit of cleaning and maintenance. A good seamstress can transform an heirloom gown into a magical garment for monumentally less than a new dress would cost. A new gown will not have the sentimental history or have quite as significant as an effect either.
Honeymoon Hacks
Honeymoons are all about romance. Your first night together as a married couple should be about bonding together and enjoying each other. The only thing you need to accomplish that is each other. Expensive European excursions and fancy hotels are just extras. You can cut wedding costs considerably by choosing a modest honeymoon location. Stay local and save even more money by visiting some of the attractions in your home state.
A less expensive wedding does not mean a wedding lacking in class, sophistication, or glamor. The amount you spend has less to do with the quality of your wedding than the way you spend it. A simple, tasteful wedding can leave your guest with fonder memories of love and romance than the most lavish of affairs. Concentrate more on allowing your guests to share in your love than all the bells and whistles you can provide, and your wedding will be everything you hope it will be.
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