There is no question that weddings can be expensive and that most of us have to plan one within a budget. Certain parts of the wedding planning will be more challenging to fit into your budget than others.
The first thing many couples struggle with is exactly who to invite to their wedding. This is a crucial aspect of your planning because you will need to choose a venue that can hold the number of people you expect to invite. Since for most couples, the wedding venue is the most expensive part, these two considerations go hand in hand.
To make it easier to fit your venue into your wedding budget it helps to be flexible when it comes to choosing one. This also goes hand in hand with the date you’d like to get married on. It can be a challenge to keep from blowing your budget if you have a desire to get married over a holiday weekend or you have your heart set on a Saturday wedding. To get around the high cost of any wedding venue, consider having the ceremony on a Friday afternoon/evening or anytime on a Sunday.
So many aspects come into the wedding planning process that it can be easy to spend the budget on the bigger aspects while forgetting about the smaller ones. This becomes challenging when you realize you have left a part of the planning process out of your budget.
While it is easy to think of purchasing wedding invitations you might get thrown for a loop when you realize how much money you’ll have to spend on postage to mail them all out. You may also not realize that it will cost you more for postage if your wedding invitations are square. One way around this is to hand deliver as many of your invitations as you can. If you do need to mail invitations stick to the standard stamps, as fancier stamps will cost you more and the truth is that your guests aren’t likely to take a second glance at the stamp on their invitation. In addition to mailing out the invitations you’ll also have to separately mail out the RSVP and save the date cards, as well as the thank you cards you’ll send after the wedding.
Speaking of, on your wedding day you’re going to need a lot of small items that you might not think of before you leave home. This usually leads to someone from the wedding running out and picking up last minute items, which can result in spending money you didn’t have budgeted to spend. The best way around this is to pack a bag of wedding day necessities at least one week before the big event.
These are some of the most common things we forget when planning the budget for a wedding. When you have an effective game plan you can avoid running into these hurtles at any point during the day of your wedding.
