Budgeting for a wedding and choosing a date should be the same activity

Normally when people start talking about wedding budgets they’ll talk about how much you should expect to pay for a photographer and how much to pay for catering. We’re not taking that route, we’ll make choices on vendors soon, as we survey the marketplace and decide who can provide services so that we can have the best wedding that expresses who we are and what our values are, a wedding with intent.

Today though, we’re going to provide a framework on how to approach budgeting and paying for a wedding, and instead of starting with a date and working backwards, we’ll start with cash and work towards a date.

Two big assumptions that upset people

My personal disposition is to not enter into debt for things that aren’t property, but I’m also a champion of adults making their own damn adult decisions, so if you want to enter married with a wedding-sized debt that’s your cross to bear, but I’m going to assume we’re not going into debt on this one.

Another assumption I’m going to make is that the two of you want to have a lifelong and joyful marriage, which means you either have done or are about to, combine finances and have joint accounts etc. Research shows that people who don’t combine finances don’t combine their lives and might as well save money on a wedding and just not get married.

The maths

So as we would do with any purchase, we start with what we have:

• a, how much money you already have saved And then we figure out how much per month we can save:
• s, how much money you can confidently save each month

Then we need to figure out how much we’d like to spend, and if you’re following this book chapter by chapter, you won’t know that yet, but we’ll create a variable for it:

• e, for total wedding expenses And when we put it all together in an equation with m being how many months away this wedding can be it looks like:
• m, how many months away the wedding will be

So once you know how much you want to spend, pull out your calculator and go

• (e - a) / s = m

Maybe you’ve decided that the wedding will cost $30,000. You’ve saved $20,000 already, and you can easily save $1000 a month.

• ($30,000 - $20,000) / $1000 = 10 months.

So if you’re reading this in January, you could be hosting your wedding in November!

The expenses

Working out your total expenses will be an activity split between scalable and static expenses.

For example, my job as a celebrant is static. Generally speaking, my fee doesn’t change if there are 20 guests or 2000 guests, but then if there were 2000 guests you might want to consider more audio gear so everyone could hear it.

But a caterer’s price does scale and change depending on the guest list. Catering for 20 people is certainly a different price than for 2000. Some caterers might offer a per-guest fee, or they would need to quote on a head count.

So there will be a little back and forth, but as we proceed into locking in vendors you’ll want to make an artistic choice on vendors, and maybe select two to three so when you have a guest list you can get quotes accordingly.

💍 Josh Withers is an Australian wedding celebrant based in Hobart who travels the world every week creating meaningful, fun, and honest marriage ceremonies for adventurous couples just like you.

📱 Follow Josh on Instagram, Threads, Facebook, Mastodon, Micro.Blog, or in a Qantas airport lounge somewhere.