Determine a Budget

Our wedding planning budget series started last week. This wedding series is really aimed at giving you some great tips to establishing a budget, sticking to it, and some tips that will really help you save some money. Let’s face it, weddings are expensive and any way we can save money and still get the wedding you want is a win for everyone. In the last blog post we covered setting priorities (link this to first post). Today our video blog series will cover what a reasonable budget will look like.

Budget Specialist

To help us with todays video on determining a budget, we are joined by one of our favorite wedding planners.  Ashley Stork started in the wedding business with planning her own wedding.  Now, she is the owner of Magnolia Vine Events. In this interview Ashely answers several questions that cover key topics when addressing the budget planning process.

Key Questions

1. What is the first thing any couple should do when setting a budget?
   1. Most people find out how much money they have and go make a budget. Ashley actually recommends getting your guest list together first and having those conversations with the whole family on both sides. She also spoke that last year in the United States the average wedding budget was $35,000 for 150 guests (about $225/ guest).

2. What are some of the pitfalls?
   1. Emotion in the budget
   2. No communication
   3. Not doing your research into your vendors and their typical price
   4. Coming up with an arbitrary budget number out of the air and saying that is your budget

3. Top tips:
   1. Step 1: Take rough guest count and multiply by $225 and establish if the budget is feasible.
   2. Step 2: Do your research into the prices for your vendors
   3. Step 3: Decide your priorities
   4. Step 4: Take 10% of budget and keep it aside for miscellaneous expenses

Stay tuned for our next blog in this series discussing taking your budget and applying it to what you want on your day. If you liked this blog, sign up for our newsletter below to get the latest information and deals we offer. See you next week.