A Business-Savvy Bride’s Approach to Setting the Wedding Budget

Originally posted in the Social Tables blog by The MBA Bride

Many brides agree that most wedding stress revolves around financing the wedding. In order to enjoy your wedding planning time, it’s important to minimize your stress and get a firm handle on your budget early in the process.

Newly-engaged brides-to-be are rarely wedding experts. To compensate for a new bride-to-be’s lack of knowledge, brides inundate themselves in wedding books, scour wedding magazines, and read every blog out there trying to find a magic bullet to tell them what the budget should be. Sound familiar yet?

Lucky for you, you’re reading this blog. Now put down that wedding book and stop flipping through the wedding magazine. Allow me to introduce you to the best tool for creating an initial wedding budget estimate.

Step One: Think of a reasonable overall budget for your wedding

Based on the wedding market in your geographic area, the type of wedding you want, and your sources of funding, come up with an initial estimate of how much a wedding will cost. For the intents of this exercise, we will use the US average wedding budget of $27,000.

Step Two: Go to the MBA Bride Budget Worksheet and download

Export the MBA Bride Budget Worksheet by following the export instructions found in the MBA Bride blog post. The sheet contains Mindy Weiss’ estimated cost allocations for each vendor category.

Step Three: Enter in your bottom line budget in the pink field

Using the now exported excel document and your preliminary bottom line budget, input the bottom line number in the pink field. Doing so will calculate all other categories and help you to identify a preliminary budget for each vendor category.

Step Four: Highlight the top 3 categories that are important to you

It is important to identify the top 3 categories that are most important to you and your future husband. Once you identify which category is crucial, you should look to build in more wiggle room into that category and pull funds from others. As an example, my fiancé and I found the venue choice to be crucial and because we were getting married on site, we eliminated the cost of transportation and put those funds toward the venue.

As a newly engaged bride, using this document will help you to approach wedding planning from a business-savvy standpoint. You can use the document to discuss your wedding with those people who influence your wedding, your vendors, and more.

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The MBA Bride is a graduate business-school student, a full-time employee at a large corporation, and a 20-something year old planning her wedding. She helps brides embrace their inner business-savvyness by applying practical business information to wedding planning. To learn more, visit www.mbabride.com and connect with the MBA Bride on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.