Wedding budgets are mysterious creatures.  If you’ve never planned a wedding, you most likely have never seen one before so you may not know what it should look like.  Regardless, you need a budget before you may start planning.  

Whether the budget is made up of money from the wedding couple, the parents, or a combination of both, staying underneath it is many times trickier than coming up with a number in the first place.  This is mostly from the unforeseen costs that come up in the last few weeks before your wedding.  For my wedding, it was the $2000 damage deposit for the venue that we totally forgot about.  With absolutely all of the money either spent or accounted for, we had to humbly borrow the money from a friend in hopes that we didn’t burn the place down so we could pay her back. Yikes!

So the moral of that story is,… plan on setting money aside as the Wedding Contingency Fund (or, as I like to call it, the “Oh S#!t Money”).   I recommend putting a line right in your budget for this and it should be about 10% of the overall budget.  That may sound like a big chunk, but last minute stuff happens and it can be very costly.  Besides, what you don’t end up using can go towards honeymoon spending money, gifts for each other, a down payment on your house, or a nice tip for your awesome wedding vendors!