Budget Weddings: Love Means Never Having to Say “We’re Broke”

May 20, 2009

The true icing on the cake-the marriage-comes after the ceremony.

The true icing on the cake: your lives together, after the ceremony.

You don’t have to be a victim of Bernie Madoff’s massive equities fraud to be feeling the pinch in 2009. Living through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression has millions of us trying to find ways to live on a budget.

When it comes to planning your wedding, however, there is a natural reluctance to even think about the word “budget.” Jill Gianola, a financial planner and author of The Young Couple’s Guide to Growing Rich Together, has a wise suggestion for how to deal with that touchy subject. “I prefer to call it a ’spending plan,’” she suggests. “That ‘b’ word is nasty,” Gianola says. What you’re really looking for is a spending plan, she suggests. “Don’t think about it as cutting back, but rather as using limited resources in the best way possible.”

That’s a good place to start when a couple is determined to have a celebration of their love for family and friends, but also determined not to go broke in the process.

Here are five important steps to getting the most out of your wedding budget:

1. Put together an initial budget. In 2008 the average American wedding cost $20,000 for 200 guests. That’s $100 per guest. Use that information simply as a starting point and work back from there.

2. Every wedding budget is the sum total of many separate items. Remember that a wedding is made up of lots of moving parts. Examine each one of those components separately and see what kind of savings you can identify as you work your way through that list.

3. Do your homework. There are an incredible number of suggestions on the web for savings on everything from flowers to wedding cakes; invitations to photographers. If you apply the logic of “Hey it’s our wedding we only want the best,” then no spending plan is going to hold up in the face of that logic. On the other hand if you think of a wedding’s budget as a bus barreling down a steep grade, tapping the brakes now and then is simply a prudent thing to do.

4. Put your wedding in context with other financial goals over the first three years of your marriage. The “big day” may come and go in a day, but as couples can tell you who are still paying off their wedding ten years down the road, the financial burden of a big wedding is a headache that keeps returning month after month. Think instead of committing to each other that your entire wedding related expenses, hopefully honeymoon too, will be paid off within three years of the big event. Now consider what some of your other spending priorities will be during this period, and plan accordingly.

5. Think outside the box. May through September weddings are more costly than November through March. Any night of the week for a wedding is less expensive than a Saturday night. A smaller wedding cake, used for photos for cutting, then removed to the kitchen where it is plated and mixed with other cakes and served as the dessert is one of many other places where you can realize substantial savings.

Point being: that savings abound for couples willing to be creative and discover that there are many ways to have a beautiful wedding without going broke.

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