June 2009 Weddings
AmyRI
member
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Wedding budgets
So, on my local Knot board, someone posted that they ran out of money and their parents were backing out of their contributions. She wanted to know what other people did if they ran out of money, and one person suggested putting it on a credit card and paying it off with gift money. She got flamed immediately. And it got me thinking about how people actually ended up paying for the wedding, since they always say people underbudget everything.
Did you have a budget to begin with? Did you stick to it in the end? Did you go into any debt for the wedding (not counting putting stuff on a CC and paying it off right away)?
Re: Wedding budgets
I set a budget at the beginning based on ballpark costs from married friends and other research. Over the course of our engagement, I raised it by $1000. I think we landed a few hundred under the new budget, though that doesn't count my wedding band or stupid incidentals that I purchased (had to buy two cake toppers and two garter sets somehow).
We paid for everything without CCs or parent contribution by slowly saving and throwing money into "the wedding fund."
Lucy Elizabeth 10.27.12
HomemadebyHolman
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We set a budget in the beginning, although we had a range built in. We had a "max of what we can afford", and "what we'd like to spend" in our spreadsheet.
The day of the wedding, we were only a couple hundred over our "what we'd like to spend" budget, which was really nice. Then, we got a refund from our venue because the open bar (on consumption) didn't go through all our money. We got $1k back, which we are putting towards our honeymoon that we're taking later this year.
I always avoid posts like these for the simple fact that my parents paid for our entire wedding and did incur some debt to do so. My parents gave me a ball park budget and I consulted them on prices before I booked any vendors. We went way over the budget (hello, 2K lost on our initial venue alone) that my dad initially thought we would spend and then my parents' taxes hit them hard this year. My dad sold his camper and truck in order to pay off the taxes and the remainder went toward the wedding. In the end he took out a small loan as well. I never once asked for them to do what they did, but I know that DH and I could not have afforded our wedding on our own either. My parent's financial decisions regarding our wedding were their own but I do realize they were driven by the desire to make me happy. Was the cost of our wedding a smart financial decision? In short, no.
We started out with an unrealistic budget, but quickly realized with the location of the venue and number of expected guests we needed to increase it. A few months later it was apparent we were going to be spending an additional $3,000 more so we increased it again. In the end, our third estimate was correct and that's what we spent.
Our parents contributed a little bit here and there, but we were saving up everything we could throughout the engagement. We were never too worried about having enough money because we were actually done saving a couple months before the wedding (which was a nice place to be). We put things on a credit card, but only to get "cash back" points -- putting our reception venue on our CC made us $100! We paid off the CC right away, so no wedding debt for us.
I think we did pretty well budget-wise. At first we were basing our budget off of our friends' wedding cost a couple years before, but had to realize that we had a lot more guests and that quickly adds up!
When we first started planning, we overbudgeted by about 5K.....but as I started looking around and finding out that I could DIY a couple of things, we dropped the budget to 15K. I know its still a lot but considering we had 200 guests with open bar in San Diego, I thought we did pretty well. I really hustled and compared florists, limos, cakes etc... to make sure i was getting the best price possible though. Even though we were not expecting any kind of help from our parents, they still gave us ~7K combined and we put the rest in from our savings. The only thing we charged was the honeymoon package (flights and hotel) so that we could accumulate the points from the credit card.
H and I saved up for 18 months to pay for our $23k wedding. Neither of our parents made any major contributions (his parents paid $400 for our church), so it all came from us and our long hours and hard work.
Our budget was realistic for where we live (Central/ Eastern MA), and knowing that neither family would be able to afford to give us a wedding, we scrimped and saved. We waited 18 months to get married - I wanted less time, but logically, we couldnt have saved that much in under a year. We used our entire savings, any money we would be saving for a house, tax returns, etc. That, and in using a CC that gave us credits back (which we paid off month to month), we paid our entire wedding in full.
We just kept in mind that our jobs could go at any moment, and there would be noone to save us if we couldnt afford it at the end.
I don't think there's anything wrong with a few k in cc debt if you can afford to pay it off in a timely manner - esp if parents reneg on money promised. But if you can't afford to have a huge, expensive wedding, you shouldn't have a huge expensive wedding and try to charge it.
My parents said, "we have $X for your wedding." I was kind of shocked since mom had told me a few years ago that I waited too long to get married, and they'd spent it on something else.
Anyways, DH is kind of old school and had assumed my parents would pay. Plus he had no interest in helping plan. So I took what my parents said they'd give me, and planned around that. Mom even thought she was going to get change back, so I tried to stay underbudget. In the end I spent about $3000 of my own money because I forgot to factor in taxes, but otherwise I stayed within the budget. It would not have occurred to me to ask them for more. My mom is retired, and the words "fixed income" come to mind. Plus my brother got married the month before I did, and my grandparents had a big event for their 60th anniversary this summer - that's a lot of travel and gifting for my parents at one time.
I should also add that the majority of our wedding was paid for by my parents. However, we did still do it for much less than the average wedding (which in the northeast is more like StJoes $24k wedding). If we had to pay for it on our own, we would have been able to. It was my parent's wish to contribute to the wedding, and we instead used our money on our house. We were incredibly fortunate.
I felt so bad for the girls that got flamed, when she didn't have the money to pay her florist 41 days before the wedding. I can't say I wouldn't have charged it at that point. Canceling the wedding that late would lose so much money in deposits.
I think it's ridiculous that she got flamed for that. Cancelling in the long run would cost you a lot more than putting it on a CC, and frankly, with 6 weeks to go, I can't imagine having to cancel. I also think it's ridiculous when they say that you should always wait to plan until you have the $$ in hand - If my parents promised me $, I'd take them at their word. Granted I wouldn't go overboard, but I think you should be able to trust your parents (the majority of the time) to follow through on a promise like that.
Sadly, DH's aunt passed away about 14 mos before the wedding (we were engaged 19 mos). We knew we were getting some inheritance, so we figured that would cover the cost. We also had been saving and paying for things as we went. Well, we just got an email this morning from the lawyer stating the checks were going out next week. Yep, 2 months AFTER the wedding. We had to turn to our parents to help us out, which they did no problem. We felt awful, but we were glad they were there and had the extra money. So excited to be able to pay them back next week! Things happen and people do the best they can.
We never really set a budget. We knew how much we could put into savings every month and pretty much worked around that. If you want to call that a budget, then I guess, yes, we had a budget. We ended up spending about 8K more than we originally planned. We were engaged for 2.5 years before we got married. We really didn't start saving until 6-8 months after we got engaged.
The only thing we put on a CC was our open bar, which was a bit under $5K (beer and wine only for 150 people at an afternoon reception.) We were a bit surprised by that.
We paid for every cent of our wedding ourselves. I think if 6 weeks before the wedding half my budget disappeared I would have probably put it on a CC. I wouldn't have wanted to, but ultimately that's what I would have done.
I think its ridiculous that the girl got flamed for charging something 6 weeks out. We paid for things all along but if we would have suddenly lost a source of our wedding money that close, we would have had to charge it if we didnt have it in savings either. There aren't a lot of options at that point. I feel bad for the girl.
We charged everything for our wedding, we just paid the bill each month and accumulated the rewards. So far this year I've gotten back over $500 in CC rewards because of it. CC use can be smart if you are responsible about it.
I also think its fine to charge something so long as there is a plan to pay it off and its realistic. I think its incredibly stupid to plan to charge $20k for a wedding though rather than plan a wedding for $5k that you can realistically afford.
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We originally budgeted $20K for our wedding, which was within what we could afford without completely wiping us out. Since we were paying for everything ourselves, that figure was for everything: rings, honeymoon, etc. It was just an arbitrary number that we plucked out of thin air because it's a pretty common amount that people spend. When things started moving and we started deciding what we wanted, that figure quickly doubled. We ended up not having enough money for everything that we wanted, so we put it on credit cards. I won't tell you exactly how much went on a credit card, but it was over $10k between the wedding, open bar, and honeymoon.
At the time, we had the mentality of "It's our wedding, and it only happens once! Just because our parents can't afford to throw us a huge party doesn't mean we can't have the wedding we want." We stuck firmly to that when people would ask. We could afford to pay off the debt relatively quickly afterward, and both of our jobs are very, very stable, so we didn't worry too much about it. Now that it's all said and done, it wasn't worth the debt. People say that all the time, and you never realize how true it is until it's over. In the end though, we loved our wedding. When the debt is gone and we're moving forward, we'll just chock it up to another life lesson.
I had a budget in my head that I wanted to stick with. In the end what I wanted my mom to pay for she did and had enough money left over but we always shot high on price. DH and I saved more then what we needed to though.
I think we stucked to our budget very well. Knowing what I wanted my mom to spend and his mom and dad to spend was a big help. My dad was not able to give us anything but we made up for it. I think that helped a lot.
it is a good idea to pay for deposits with a CC. if the vendor fails to provide the good or service, the customer is protected by federal law and is entitled to a refund. I used a CC for ALL of our deposits and since we had a very inexpensive (different from cheap) we pretty much put the whole amount on credit cards which were immediately paid off the following month.
to answer your question, I began with a budget when i knew nothing about weddings, then as i became more savy and got an idea of what we (i) wanted, scaled it down. excluding the honeymoon we stayed about at our budget.