Creating a wedding budget can be daunting, but absolutely worth it to stay in control of your wedding planning.
Even if you’re not into budgets, if you’re planning a wedding, it’s super important to know how to create one. And if you read nothing else that I write, read this before you start spending money on your wedding.
As you may already know from personal experience, having a budget is crucial to understand what you are able to spend. With a budget, you can measure if you can safely choose to buy something, or if you’ll have to skip it. This isn’t just true for weddings, it’s true for life. By having a set amount of money set aside for your wedding, that you agree up front with yourself, partner, and family that you will not go over, it will help you make choices during the wedding planning process that you will not regret later on.
While creating and maintaining a budget isn’t the sexiest part of wedding planning, it is essential and will help make the rest of your planning easier. Planning a wedding can be overwhelming as there are a million decisions you have to make about every little thing. Once you have a budget created, you’ll be able to narrow down those decisions into what you can afford. Plus, you’ll have an easier time determining what’s been paid for and who will take care of it. More on that later.
This post is going to give you step by step instructions on how to create a wedding budget, how to track what’s been spent, what is committed to be spent, and how it will get paid for. If nothing else, use this advice to at add up what you have to spend on your wedding and attempt to bucketize each category you’ll spend money on, as best you can. Budgets don’t have to be crazy detailed, but they should be thorough.
Let’s get into the instructions!
HOW TO CREATE A DETAILED WEDDING BUDGET
I’ll start by going into my experience with budgets.
With a masters degree in business, it was a requirement that I took higher level accounting and finance classes to achieve my education. I also have a lot of professional experience balancing large dollar projects. I’ve spent most of the last decade forecasting how much large construction projects would cost from start to finish, with the costs of the projects ranging from $500,000 to $80,000,000. My job as a project manager is to not only predict how much we spend on projects, but to adjust and re-adjust each month.
So, long story short, budgeting for a wedding was second nature for me.
There are a few steps to this process, but they aren’t that complicated. I’ll try and break them down into manageable chunks so they aren’t too overwhelming:
1. List out everything you want to budget for
This is where you get to really think about your wedding and the elements that will go into it.
Of course, you’ll probably spend money on a venue, photography, food, and also clothes. You may also have videography, entertainment, gifts, invitations, tip money, decorations, and lighting. There are also “extra” items like a thank you brunch, welcome bags, favors, premarital counseling. . . the list can go on and on.
An easy way to start here is to list out the major items that you’ll spend money on, and then work your way from there. Take some time to build this list, spend a few sessions over a few days if you need to. Look up wedding budget checklists online as well, in case you miss something. I found that it also helped to group items into categories, just to keep things organized. This step is optional – it just helped me break down where the payments were going and made sure I didn’t miss any details.
The important part is to really have a comprehensive itemization of each thing you will spend money on at your wedding. You can also include items that you are considering purchasing, until you rule them out.
Here’s what this looks like if you use a spreadsheet like Excel:
2. Assign a forecasted cost to each item
The amount a wedding item can cost will vary widely based on your location and expectations.
For example, you may be able to get married for free at your family’s farm, or you may spend upwards of $100,000 getting married at Disneyland. You’ll have to do a little research and perhaps use your own judgement for this next step of taking your list of items and putting a forecasted cost next to them.
Now, what I mean by forecasting is that it is an educated guess. It is not an exact price, yet.
There is a 99% chance that it will change once the price is actually known. A forecast can also be called a prediction, an anticipation, or just plain guess.
How to determine how much something costs
Don’t know what something costs? Honestly, looking online is a great way to find out. There social media groups dedicated to wedding planning where you can ask others. Or, reach out to the actual professionals. Many venues, photographers, and DJ’s will have their lists on their websites or they will respond with prices after a simple email.
If you really can’t find a price of an item easily, for now just put something reasonable in its place. The point of this exercise is not to have the exact amount of your wedding known immediately, it’s to give you a number that you can work with while planning.
My advice for forecasting is to look up what things cost in your area, maybe also ask for some quotes, and put in an amount that you would feel comfortable spending on each item. In the example below, the forecasted amount would go in the “Likely” column. This means that this is the amount you would likely spend on each item.
3. Determine the Worst Case and Best Case budget
Now it’s time to figure out the range of what you would spend.
Once you have your list of items, and your forecasted costs, it’s time to figure out the range of what your wedding cost will amount to. This is essentially the least amount that you will spend, and the most amount that you will spend – Best Case and Worst Case scenarios.
It’s important to know the range for a few reasons. Knowing the Best Case (or Low) amount that you will spend will help you make sure that you have that amount of money allocated for your wedding. Even in the best scenario, you will still need to spend this amount.
The Worst Case (or High) scenario is also equally important, because you’ll need to understand how you can come up with the difference if you end up on the high end. Essentially, as you spend money on your wedding, and track those dollars, you can predict early on if you’ll spend above your likely wedding forecast, and work with your partner to determine how you will pay for the difference.
Tracking Best and Worst case budgets
To track the Best and Worst case, simply create two columns in your spreadsheet, one for the “Low” and one for the “High”.
In your “Best” or “Low” case, multiply your forecasted cost by .75.
In your “Worst” or “High” case, multiply your forecasted cost by 1.25.
You can do each of these equations in Excel, by using a simple formula. As an example, let’s look at “Cake / Dessert”:
For Low, in cell D9, put in the formula =C9*.75
For High, in cell E9, put in the formula =C9*1.25
Here’s how it would look if your cake will likely cost $1,000 (which seems expensive for a cake, but let’s go with it for easy learning):
You can take that same formula and apply it to all the items on your budget spreadsheet. I found that this gave me a pretty reasonable range of what we could spend on our wedding.
That’s it. This really does help you see a range of how much or how little you may spend on each item.
Once you find out the actual price of something, all three columns can be the actual price.
4. Create a committed column
This column is helpful for you to track what’s already spent.
Here’s how it works.
Most vendors will require a deposit before you actually have the big day. This deposit is considered a committed cost, because theoretically you can’t get it back and it’s already spent. It is a best practice to track what you have spent, so you can better anticipated what’s left to spend.
Let’s look at the cake again, for an example. The cake may cost $1,000, but in order to place the order you may have to put down a deposit of $200. The $200 is your committed cost.
5. Add your budget up
This is just as it sounds. Once you have your likely amount for each category, plus your Low and High cases, sum up the total at the bottom of each column.
This is simple to do in a spreadsheet. If you’re unsure how, you can look up step by step instructions to add up amounts, it’s fairly straightforward. The important part is that you have a clear understanding of all the amounts and what they may mean for your wedding. The Likely amount is the price of your wedding that you can expect, while the Low and High may be as little or much as you’ll be spending. Gathering a clear understanding early on will help you make wise decisions so your wedding choices can better fit your wedding budget.
6. Track who is paying for what
This is an optional step, but one that helped me.
If you and your partner are paying for absolutely everything at your wedding, you may want to just skip this recommendation. However, if you have multiple families making contributions, and want to stay organized about who is paying for what, this helps. I found that adding a column that tracked “who is paying for this” helped me to recognize how much my partner and I would need to come up with, and how much we needed to receive from our families (who did help us).
Here’s how it looks:
7. Maintain and update your budget
You’ve just put in so much work and now it’s time to make it work for you.
If you update amounts of items in your budget as you solidify decisions, your forecast will become much more concrete. When you confirm a price of something, update your spreadsheet. Make the “Low” and “High” amounts the same as “Likely” once you’re sure of what the price will be. As time goes on, the range between Low and High will get smaller and this will help with the anticipated spend.
By the time you get close to your wedding date, there should be no surprises.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
There you go!
This process is incredibly intentional. It does take some up front work and attention as you plan your wedding, but it will remove a lot of grief later on. Money can be a huge stressor when it comes to wedding planning, and if you create a budget up front, I promise you will feel more in control throughout the whole process. You’ll know at a glance how much your wedding is costing you, what kind of funds you will need, and where you are financially at all times.
You’ve got this!
For a full example of a wedding budget spreadsheet, here is what the end blank result may look like:
More From Hummingbird Wedding Advice:
How To Write Your Own Wedding Vows
How To Have A Wedding For Less Than $5,000
Creating Cohesive Looks For Your Wedding Décor
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