In the organisation of weddings, you will find yourself with a very exciting part that will fill you with illusion : deciding what kind of wedding you want, looking for a wedding dress, do a Pinterest moodboard with thousands of ideas, and just keep dreaming. However sooner or later, you will be confronted to reality: the wedding budget.
It is important that you do not see this theme as something negative, but as a way to establish bases, and if you are doing it in an organised way, it will help you and will be used as a guide in all of the process. At Perfect Venue we want to help you forget this fear when comes the moment to face the wedding budget, which is why in this post we give you recommendations to organise yourself and make your wedding a success.
XIII century castle in Cataluña
Choose the date
Yes, the date is also important for the wedding budget. Celebrating a wedding in high season is not the same than in low season, just like it differs if it is celebrated during the week or during the weekend. You have to choose depending on your availability and your guests’ availabilities, and on the kind of wedding you want, but it is important that you know that you can save part of the budget depending on the season and the day.
Create a document
Very important. Every project, even more when it comes to numbers, has to begin with a file on the computer, with a document or an excel file which will be a guide that will reflect everything. We recommand you to start by doing a list with the main expenses :
- Venue
- Music
- Dress
- Decor
- Flowers
- Transportation
From there, you can start dividing it like you want. For instance, when it comes to decor :
- Flowers
- Centerpieces
- Tableware
- Altar
- Carpet
This is just an example so that you have an idea, but the purpose is that of this document is to reflect absolutely everything you are deciding, including relevant notes so you won’t forget anything.
Palace Aldovea, Madrid
Choose who will be in charge of payments
It is essential to establish who will be in charge of making the payments and, in case you are in charge of everything, you should consider whether to open a common expense account. This will facilitate the work and will help you differentiate wedding expenses from those that are not, and thus you will have more control on the wedding budget. Imagine what a mess if every time you pay, the payment is made with a different card…
Establish a basis
It is impossible to start looking for suppliers or start preparing the wedding if you do not have an idea of how much you are willing to spend. Perhaps at the beginning it is difficult to establish a figure, but it is important at least to decide a range of prices that you do not want to exceed.
Castillo des Girards, France.
Analyze where you can save money
Once you have established the budget, you can break down amounts according to the different aspects of the wedding and, therefore, see where you can save money and where not. Maybe you want to allocate more budget to the flowers than to the dress, because for you it is a fundamental part of the decoration. You will see it as you ask for different budgets.
Among the ways you can save at the wedding, there are also several tricks: use seasonal flowers that will always be cheaper, hire suppliers near the place where it is held so that transportation is not exorbitant or, as we have said before, Hold a wedding during the week.
Keep aside an amount in case of incidents
Something fundamental that you must take into account is that you should not always be at the budget limit, since it is important to allocate a part to unforeseen events : one guest more than what you had planned, an invoice that you forgot or simply that you happen to add something after
Villa Camilla, in Italy
Organize payments and invoices
When you are already fully involved in the preparations, you will see that you need to organize the split payments and the different invoices from the suppliers. For this, we recommend you to include in the document that we have described above a section next to each professional that indicates which payments have been made and which have not (with an expiration date). In addition, the contracts must be in the same folder to be able to have a look whenever you have doubts.
Have you taken note of these tips for the wedding budget? It is essential that you do not get overwhelmed. If you follow these advices and have everything organised, there will be no surprises and you will get the wedding of your dreams.