Do you and your partner want a picnic in the park, an intimate urban party, or a huge shindig with all your friends and family? There are so many different kinds of weddings out there, and so much inspiration, that it can get overwhelming quickly. But if not, it’s time to get to dreaming. This may be the one part of wedding planning that you’ve already knocked out of the park. THINK ABOUT THE KIND OF WEDDING YOU WANT TO HAVE Because no matter what anyone tells you, it really is possible to have a perfect (for you) wedding on whatever budget you have. What follows is a breakdown of how to even set a budget, and then eleven sample wedding budgets, ranging from $2,000 to $30,000, in a variety of styles and sizes. But how do you figure out what that budget is in the first place? And how do you do it in a way that’s not going to give you sticker shock later? We’ve all read and researched the tips and tricks for how to save money, how to have a budget wedding, and even how to stick to a budget. Planning a Restaurant Wedding? Read This First How Wedding Planning Takes All Your Money (And Slowly Destroys Your Soul) My Friend Said I Should Sell My House To Afford Her Wedding Rehearsal Dinner Ideas + Etiquette For The Modern World Then it turns out that the only wedding photographers in their area who didn’t call them “sweetie” during the initial meeting charged $3,000 instead of the $2,500 they were hoping to spend, and not being talked down to felt like it was worth finding an extra $500 in the budget. Next thing they knew, the combined total of those surprises was $5,000 and rising. Or they found out their dad would be heartbroken if they just served sandwiches. You would know better.) In reality? The culprit was that they thought chair rentals cost $1 when they really cost $2. The media would like us to think that these couples just got caught up in the expectations of the wedding industry and spent $10,000 on crystal vases. Which is how you end up reading things on APW that start with, “We set a budget of $5,000 but once we started actually planning, that number quickly tripled.” The problem is, it’s almost impossible to know how much the event you’re envision is going to cost until you start getting into the nitty-gritty of planning.

And then you hope really hard that the two concepts match up.

Then you think about how much you’re comfortable spending. First you think about the wedding you want. That means lots of people start planning a similar way. For most couples, a wedding is the first time you’ll ever have to think about planning a huge event, let alone creating a wedding budget.

Wedding budget worksheet