Budget Question/opinion

Wedding expense items not purchased by you should be part of the budget to know where your total cost would be vs. the calculated. It does help to know though the help of someone else doing it as a gift is nice.

I know my parents bought my wedding outfit as well as paid for the rentals of the vases/floral ball topper and money box.

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Thanks all for the food for thought - you are all awesome sauce!

I think I would include it for myself I think I'd like to see the total price and it would make me feel good that it was already paid. Now that we are getting closer I love putting the paid in full into the budget. Don't forget about possible alterations for your dress though.

I would omit those things! It’s been long enough now that you’re not financially recovering from those purchases anymore so why should they have anything to do with your present budget?🤷🏼‍♀️😁

I think you can include whatever you want. For example, we kept rings out of the budget because we didn’t want to feel like we couldn’t buy what we wanted.
Also since you’ve already spent that money you can just create a budget that reflects what additional amount you’re willing to spend. At the end of the day the money will be spent at one point or another.

I would still put your bands in with your budget

I agree with still including it. It's a wedding expense regardless of when you paid for it. I personally wanted to know the grand total that we spent, mostly out of curiosity, but also because at some point it's ridiculous. The wedding bands were included in our budget but they are also something we are wearing for the rest of our lives (literally the only thing you pay for that you'll pay attention to everyday for the rest of your life) so the price was merely a number.

I would still put it in the budget even though its paid off its still a wedding expense

We are not including our bands in the budget. My fiance got my bands with my ring as a set. Since we are contributing equally to the wedding budget, I didn't want him paying for half his ring since he paid for my set of 3 rings!

Everything that we had to spend money on, post-engagement ring, regardless of when we spent it, went into our budget. The dangers of omitting things from the budget when they're paid off is that you risk spending more. For example, if you wanted a $20K wedding but omit the costs of rings and the dress, or anything else that you fully paid for, you might end up with a $25K wedding because of the mentality of now "having the wiggle room."

But if you're looking to start from scratch and want to put a dollar amount that you're saving/building towards for future costs of the wedding, then you can omit it. For example, let's say you think you can scrape together $15K to spend on the upcoming wedding based on your circumstances. I would omit the rings and dress since it's not something you need to save up for.

We paid off our clothes and rings well before the actual wedding date and when the government announced the 3-Step reopening, we basically started from scratch since we axed our original plans, but still included the clothes and rings in our revised-budget. But in our case, we wanted to be strict with our final expenditure. It also really forced us to not over-bloat our budget.