Budget

Congratulations! I am 24 and it will be a year and half engagement time. I bought decor right away and regret it as my look on the wedding has changed few times! but gonna make the decor work. I would also suggest looking at rentals compared to buying as I didn't realize till recently how much some rentals costed compared to what I bought. DIY is nice, however my friend had an extremely hard time getting rid of it all after! I would suggest a budget as well. We ended up going over ours a chunk, but we managed to see where we could cut back as well. See how big your guest list is too. This makes a difference because its not just per plate for a person, its per chair, per napkin, per favor, and so on for that one person to be there. For us, we are young, own a house, have debt, recently switched jobs of less pay when moved in together and adjusting. We are trying to do it under $15k. That is still stretching us very thin and we are going to do a buck and doe for it to hopefully help us!

Congratulations on your engagement! First thing you should do is work on a guest list. Get a rough idea of how many people you’ll be inviting. That number alone will tell you where you can and can’t have your wedding. (Due to size of venue, food sales minimums etc) Everyone’s budget is different along with what people thing is reasonable. There are plenty of people who have back yard weddings with a large amount of people for $5000. There are also people who have smaller weddings for $50,000. It will solely depend on what you can afford and if your families are helping you out as well. Once you figure out what you can spend, you can then start to allocate where the money will go. In my opinion the most important things are food and photographer. You don’t always remember what you ate at someone’s wedding, but you remember if their food was good or bad. Also your wedding is only one day, the pictures are forever. IMO that’s one thing you should not cheap out on. Focus more on their style of photography, and if they have a great prices then that’s a bonus.

Hi!

I’m 23 and planning my wedding. Honestly, we’re saving up for a house so our budget is $10 000. To keep with our budget we opted for a lot of DIY projects! Theyre fun and make for great bonding time (my FH has a 7year old daughter so I had her help me with the favours, which she enjoyed). Honestly, if you’re going that route, Michaels was awesome for supplies - but only buy from there if you have a coupon (can be found on their website). I got a lot of things from Wish.com, Amazon, Ebay, and even Facebook Marketplace!
I started planning my wedding 12 months before the date and this gave me a good 6 months to do research, find ideas, and order items before actually putting a plan in go.
Good luck and enjoy the planning!

Thank you so much! It’s nice to know someone else is getting married at 21!

Congrats on the engagement and welcome to the wedding wire community!!!!

I too am 21 years old and planning my wedding

The budget me and my Fiancé have is $20,000.

For the most part we were told that food and venue should take up half of your budget (although if we include alcohol there goes another quarter of our budge).

My dress is a wedding present my parents are paying for so the only thing left to pay for is the photographer (who is a friend), officiant (who is an uncle), decor, and DJ (who is a friend).

Definitely splurge on good food and drinks, but don't feel the need to pay too much for the decor or DJ.

Whatever the budget - it can work as long as you can compromise elsewhere (such as head count - we have a 250 ppl wedding).