Celebrating your wedding day may be the most important day of your life. It can also be one of the most expensive.
While you want to remember it forever, you don’t want to spend a lifetime paying for it.
Here are five tips for planning a successful wedding without breaking the bank:
Set a budget.
When you’re planning your wedding, make sure you include all expenses and set some aside for unforeseen expenses. There are many online calculators to help you determine how much money you’ll need. But if in doubt, overestimate your costs rather than underestimate them. You want to be sure you have enough cash to pay for everything.
Start saving early.
Once you’ve decided on a budget, create a savings plan with goals to help keep yourself on track. Having an event like a wedding is a great opportunity to start saving regularly or increase the amount of money that’s already going into your savings account every month. Look over your current spending habits and find ways to cut back so you can save more each month and build up an emergency fund that will help cover unexpected expenses that pop up during the wedding planning process or beyond.
Decide what’s important to you and your partner
At the end of the day, it’s your wedding and you want to be happy with how it turns out. There will be a lot of pressure from friends and family to do things a certain way or spend money on certain things, but those may not be your priorities. Sit down together and talk about how you want your wedding day to be — romantic? Traditional? Fun? — and decide what factors will make it most memorable for both of you.
Consider the season
You’ve probably already got a rough idea of what time of year you want to get married, but it’s worth considering this very carefully. The weather can affect your wedding day in so many ways, from guests being stuck indoors or outside for too long, to your plans for photos being ruined by rain.
The venue you choose may be cheaper if you book on an off-peak day, or during the week. There may be certain dates that are popular in your family or with guests that you want to avoid. But just make sure that you consider every possibility and decide what is best for you and your partner rather than letting other people dictate your decision.
