Money, Money, Money, Moooney...Mooonnneeeyy!

I am a budget bride and I don't have an issue with admitting that I'm planning a wedding on a pretty tight budget. Now, there are probably budgets out there that are even tighter than mine but to be honest what bride doesn't wish she had a little more money, you know 1k here, 5k there. Those dollars could really go a long way toward things that aren't within the budget. But when we finally decided to start planning the wedding there was one thing that we knew for sure...no debt for the wedding...it was going to be all cash. And additionally, we knew we were going to be the one's footing the bill for the entire shindig (unless someone wants to toss in a few dollars) and I'm probably not gonna say no.

Once we logically thought about how much we would be comfortable putting on the table for the wedding we settled on a budget of $12,500. And believe me that number still makes cringe a little, I mean there are so many other things I could be doing with that money, but I digress. And considering that the average cost of a DC area wedding is between 27k-45k (check your city here) I think were doing pretty good. But this budget is also very aggressive and we'll have to see if we can actually pull it off.

So with our budget in mind I did what every bride does and I plugged it into one of those wedding budget generators and the allocations were ridiculous, meaning, who on my type of budget would really spend almost $400 on stationary! But if you take a look below, I've compared what the "Traditional" budget generator says we should be spending on the typical categories and then tweaked the figures a bit based on how I foresee our money being allocated.

*The percentages shown are based on how each category makes up the total budget.

As you can see strictly based on budget we've prioritized the reception and photography over everything else, allowing it to take much larger portions of the budget than traditionally allocated. But those are the things which we are placing a higher value and were fine with spending the extra money in those respective areas.

The closer we get to booking additional vendors and really understanding our decor plans, we will be able to really zero in on the final estimates of our wedding day.

How's your budget holding up?