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I voted totally worth it, but I'm for sure on the low end of things. We made sure we had everything we needed, but we didn't spend more than we had saved for the wedding.
I voted other. In retrospect, I would have convinced my husband to take a month-long honeymoon and elope instead of a wedding and a two-week honeymoon. :) I don't regret the money spent, but I would spend it a little differently.
I would have done mostly everything the same, but cut back in a few areas (especially all the custom letterpress stationary I had to have, although it was so beautiful).
I am so glad that we (DH & I, and both sets of parents) spent the money to have EVERYONE important to us at the wedding. (invited 400, 300 came). It's so so so special to have everyone important to you from every aspect of your life in one room at the same time. Like some kind of weird dream. I was so overwhelmed because everytime I turned around, there was another person I love (and who loves me/us!). It really was an investment.
We did pretty good. We threw a wedding for 18K (our budget was 15K-20K) not including rings and honeymoon. We budgeted big time. Yes, we could have gone more casual but he was very very adamant about our guest list being what it was and us having a full out wedding so considering the limits we'd already put on ourselves, we did it for what we could! Not sure I would have wanted it any other way, honestly. I DIY'd so much...long story short, about 13K was food, liquor, venue, ceremony, reception, $3.2K was our photographer....and obviously the rest was things like invitations, my wedding dress, tuxes, and gifts for our bridesmaids and groomsmen (which ate up like 1K). It would have been hard to cut it any shorter without 100% changing the "feel"
I wish I had more money? LOL Honestly, that was the first thing that came to mind. My wedding is being planned on a super tight shoe string budget, but honestly, now that I think about it, If I had more money to spend, I really don't think I would do anything different. I'm always looking for a deal, I love DIY projects, so I guess the only thing money would help out with is taking the stress off of paying for the things I have already chosen to have....oh, and I would love to be able to afford to buy my future hubby the ring he "really" wants...but in pops the evil word...budget...grrrr lol
I feel okay with our budget right now compared to what I have heard friends/family say they spent. I have a max in my head and if we go over that I'll be sick. I'm okay with what our budget looks like now. But give me 3-4 more months and I might be thinking otherwise.
My vote is for: I wouldn't make major changes, but I would have cut back in a few areas.
We spent about $10,000 - about $6,000 of it was on food and drinks for the night of the reception and the night of the ceremony dinner. We thought it would be and it definitely was definitely well spent $. We had people commenting at the ceremony dinner how good the food was, DH's cousin even included a comment about it in her facebook status message.
Things I spent more on originally than I intended were:
- the dress
- transportation
- hair and makeup
and all of it was worth it. I felt and looked like a milliion bucks, and it showed. The car (rented for the entire weekend) was more than I wanted to spend but it was so nice to have an attractive vehicle to take us not only to the ceremony, the dinner, and the reception but to bring on our honeymoon.
What I would have maybe spent less on:
- DJ (after our experience I think renting a sound system with a mic and using an IPod would have been a better option for us
and that's really about it. I would have maybe cut back a bit on favors and the centerpieces, but I'm still happy with what was spent and the end result.
We spent a lot more than we thought we would. Around $20,000 all said and done (counting EVERYTHING). I made about 2 grand worth of silly purchases, which I regret. In general I feel like "that was too much" but when I consider the places we splurged (On my dress and his suits, and the food and the church) there isn't anything I could bare to left go of!
We were a little under our budget, but I think it was worth what we spent. The things that we spent money on (venue, photographer, etc) were totally worth it. We got so many great comments from guests on the venue and the photos turned out awesome.
I voted other, but we spent $4k total- including my dress, suit rentals (we paid for all), catering, alcohol, EVERYTHING. And I wouldn't have changed a single thing about my day. Not one. itty. bitty. teeny. tiny. thing. Everything was perfect. I feel like we spent the exact amount we needed to spend.
Budget wise, I kind of wish that I could let go of my tightwad nature a little bit. I'm glad we splurged on photography, and I loved our flowers, but I was really restrictive with our budget. Came to find out the day after our wedding that his family was willing to contribute much, much more than they did.
I really strove to keep costs down for their sake!
At first I had buyers remorse over our TTD shoot on our honeymoon. But after seeing the photos I am in love and can't believe I ever did regret it.
One thing I wish I had spent less on was the food. We paid an insane amount per plate and I wish I had spent that on my guests instead of their food!
I feel like we did a good job on our budget, and like the wedding was really great. We loved every minute of it.
But shortly after we got back from our honeymoon we had a falling out with our landlord and decided to start looking at houses, a year earlier than I expected. Now I'm thinking about how great it would be to put all that money to a house instead...
Then again, our budget came under 4K and it is hard to complain about that!
It is weird, we did our weekend wedding for under 2K and that includes lodging for all of our 15 guests, but after all was said and done, we still wish we went to courthouse, had a friend do photos in a rose garden in town we love and did a dinner, night out on town with friends and family. I am very budget savy in all areas of life and even if it was our wedding, I was not wasting money I could put in savings and earn interest on. TO ME, IMHO only, it is so not worth it. I know many people feel other wise, but I am having more fun with marriage then the actual wedding day and it went by way too fast. We still would have done the above if money was never an issue and had unlimited funds. I rather have my house we are building and buy nice things for that and save for our future and our future childrens future then spend elsewhere. But thats me bc I grew up with nothing and refuse to live life the way my financially irresponsible family did/does. Plus the strict budgeting and fast wedding planning really helped my DH and I communicate on all levels especially financially and while that is a huge area for arguments with most couples, we have a strong bond and are on the same page regarding our finances and we learned alot from each other planning the wedding.
I would have changed the style and guest list of our wedding somewhat, but I'm happy with the amount of money we spent! It's significantly less than what I thought I'd be able to work with but we really planned something i was proud of with what we had!
I actually voted to spend a little more. Throughout the entire planning process my now-DH was a little weary of some of things I wanted to spend money on. There were a few things that I decided to just cut out, not because I didn't think it was in our budget or because we couldn't afford it, but because he started saying it was beginning to look too much like a lavish wedding and he didn't want people to be thinking that.
There had never been a reception held at our venue before so neither of us knew how things would look until we set everything up the night before our wedding. A few things I wished I had spent some more money on:
- MORE CANDLES! I bought tons of votives (216) online and ordered about 30 pillar candles (2 different sizes) as well. They made an effect but not as big of one as I wanted- since it was a 2-story ballroom the candlelight wasn't as "va-voom" as I wanted because the space was so big.
- A drape above the head table and drape as a backdrop for the arbor we married under... for a flowy effect! I considered this, even moreso for the ceremony location, but since we were already having a big flower arrangement over the arbor I thought it wouldn't be needed. I wish I had done it... again, for a "va-voom" effect.
- More appetizers! We didn't make it to our cocktail hour but I guess they were eaten quickly! I considered this prior to the wedding but it was one of those things my DH said we "should cut out!" In fact, he wanted to cut out even more apps!
- More vases! I ordered 448 garden and peony roses from FiftyFlowers.com and some carnations. I ended up with a tub-full of flowers leftover with nothing to do with... probably 100 I would say- they just went wasted. I thought more than 20 would fit in the centerpiece vases but since garden/peony roses are so big I couldn't jam any more in there. Had I had more vases I could've made use of the flowers I had leftover and it would've been like a garden in there! :(
- A day after session. We already had 2 hours of photographs but I wanted to have some pictures of us on a beach as well. We were married at a mansion in a garden and it was beautiful but I always wanted some beach pictures with just the 2 of us.
- I would've spent a little more on my dress, too. I am not sure I picked a dress that was "made for me" and wish I would've kept looking...
- Signature drink. We had an open-bar but no signature drinks. I wish we would've arranged something, I am not sure this even would've equaled MORE MONEY necessarily since we had a package; however, we probably would've had to figure something out for glasses as our caterer could only provide plastic cups since it was offsite (except for the wine glasses). Maybe mason jars? :)
All in all, we still spent quite a bit, but that's why I figure that if we already spent this much I wish I would've spent the little extra so I don't have anything to look back on and think "we should've done that, too!"
My wedding is a budget buster because my parents are hosting. If I had it my way, we would have gotten the same nice things for the wedding, but had half the guest list, so the wedding would have cost less.
My fiance and I also just bought a house and it needs so much done to it. Sometimes I wish my parents had just given us the money they are spending towards the wedding and we could have eloped. But this is one of those situations where this is really as much their party at this point as it is ours and this is what they want to do with the money and had always planned to do with the money.
If I had to do it again, knowing what I know now, I probably would have made it smaller and done it for less. Although it's hard to know how I would have done that other than smaller quantities. Thank goodness I was really strict with our budget otherwise I might be regretting spending the money but as it was we came in just over budget. (I think. I haven't crunched the numbers yet. So much for doing my homework this weekend!)
I don't have serious regrets about the money we spent for our wedding - the things I bought that we didn't end up using/needing come to roughly $200. In the grand scheme of things that doesn't sound like a lot, and I made some of it back by selling the items...but I still feel silly about it and whenever I'm in the grocery store I always end up thinking "that money could have covered this grocery bill", or helped with the mortgage, etc.
But as my husband liked to point out when necessary, I'm a bit of a tightwad - our wedding was nice and we got lots of great compliments on the decorations and food. I need to let that $200 go.
Our planned wedding budget was $3000. Our grand total was $4810.75. Not terrible, just $1800 over but when the original plan was $3000 and the total was $4800.... it's kind of a big difference. Looking back on what was important (and what guests thought were important) I could have cut down my budget a lot. I bought way too much of everything, LOL!
Mine was perfect! Everything's all paid off and I wouldn't change a thing.
In retrospect - I probably wouldn't have made a whole lot of changes, but a few. The amount probably would have been the same.
Our original budget was $20k for a wedding for about 60 people. We ended up doubling that amount plus more. Ugh. Oh well, it was a perfect day!
We ran overbudget on:
Photographer - our phototog was 4x our original budget but we really wanted her so....lol
Wedding gown, shoes and accessories + alternations
gifts for wedding party
various details/decorations
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Ok, as I mentioned in my other post - really curious as to how people feel about the budget in retrospect. I am freaking a bit about the money that goes into weddings. Whether you are spending 7,000 or 70,000, it's still a lot of money! I worry about buyer's remorse after the day is over.
On the one hand, I feel like it is so much money for a day, and a day that will fly by so quickly to boot. On the other, I think, well, it's not really just 'a day' - it's your wedding day, a day you spend a year planning, and a day that people will associate with you for a long time to come.