Wedding Budget System: How to help stay within your wedding budget

Before we started wedding planning, we came up with a system that would help us streamline our decision-making process when choosing between vendors, and also help us stay within our wedding budget.

Before we booked anything, we listed out all of the purchases required for the wedding, including items, services, and vendors, and then categorized all of these into either "splurge," "normal," or "save."

Here are some examples of wedding expenses and how we chose to categorize them for our wedding:

It's helpful to talk through each expense with your partner and come to an agreement on how to categorize each one. Here are some examples of how we made these decisions!

For instance, we chose to put cake under "save"; we had some other really creative dessert ideas and figured people would want to try those, so we didn't need to spend as much on a cake. 

We also put our Haldi outfits under "save." These outfits usually get ruined anyway, and our Haldi event was a bit smaller than all of our other events, so we felt like this was a good opportunity to save.

Bar was something we categorized as "normal": we didn't serve any top-shelf liquor, but we did want to spend enough on the bar for people to have a good time.

We put venue under "normal" as well; we were okay with a medium-tier venue, but we put decor under "splurge" so that we could transform the venue into whatever we wanted it to be.

Photography was also something we put under "splurge"; we were ok with spending a bit extra if needed to get the exact style of photography that we wanted for our wedding pictures. 

There are a lot of decisions that have to be made during the wedding planning process, and there are so many vendors within every category, each with their own ranges of pricing and experiences. Being on the same page as your partner on how much relative spend you want for each category can really help make decisions faster and help you to not get so overwhelmed throughout the process!

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