Sticker Shock

I was pretty prepared when we first started planning for things to be super expensive, so there weren't many huge shocks to me.

When I was researching, I was super shocked at how expensive a videographer was. Although I would love to have one, it is not in my budget.

I had kind of a reverse sticker shock I guess you could say when it came to my florist. We had gone in for a meeting, gave her pictures of what we wanted, colours etc. For 5 bouquets, 8 Boutonnieres, 2 corsages, and 1 floral ball, I was expecting at least $1,500 - $2,000. When she quoted us for $800 and change, tax, delivery, and vases included I almost fell off my chair!

Our sticker shock came from the price of the food from our venue. It was a hard pill to swallow to know that our 100 person guest list (which has grown to more) meant we’d spend $10,000 on food alone!

I totally agree! Photographers were the first thing to give my fh and I sticker shock! Followed closely by caterors! The crazy part is my FH is a videographer and does some weddings so neither of us anticipated being shocked by wedding pricing lol

The flowers are what got me too! I knew it was going to be pricy, but I thought I'd be able to go and be like "My budget is $$$$, make it happen!" but my budget was actually much lower than I should have had it. Needless to say, my flowers are costing me nearly twice what I thought they would.

I think almost everyone goes over budget a little bit with one thing or another, as long as it isn't crazy it is usually manageable.

Going into all the wedding planning we expected certain things to be certain costs. We were prepared for the photographer and videographer and for venue costs. Once we actually started getting quotes though we were surprised by the cost of our DJ and the catering. Over half our wedding costs is food!

Our florist quote was pretty low because we aren't doing any flowers except our bouquets/boutonnieres and we are using fake ivy vines in our centerpieces and fake flowers on our archway to help cut these costs. Thankfully our venue cost was lower than expected, and includes our hotel room for the night a long with the rehearsal dinner costs so we didn't have to cut costs elsewhere too much.

One other thing we did to help cut costs was just made a polaroid frame cutout and bought some props from amazon for cheap instead of paying >$400 for a photobooth.

Good luck with all the planning and budgeting

Everything once the word wedding was used - prices went up through the roof! I knew the venue would cost a bit but photography snuck up on me!

We're definitely saving in some areas with DIY stationary, no professional decorator. We also found out that booking early can save you some money since vendors charge more each year (our photographer, DJ are both at 2018 prices compared to 2019!)

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Prices are bonkers! Our guest list is 250 and that's with cutting a ton of people (my parent's had 500-600 at theirs!).

So far we were able to find what we want for the right price - we just had to go outside the city and do some DIY

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I have to chuckle at this because that is very close what we are paying for our F&B haha. Our venue is a restaurant so we are not paying facility fees, just the food and beverage and for 100 guests it sneaks under at around $17,000. And we randomly discussed at $20,000 budget ages ago, which quickly went out the door when we booked the venue lol. So I guess this whole thing has been sticker shock for us. Having an amazing cocktail hour/dinner is really our main reason for the wedding so that was our priority! I love different viewpoints.

For me the big sticker shock was the price that the venues gave when they supplied the food! NO WAY am I paying $80 per person!!! Heck, at that price I would be paying over $20,000 just on venue and food!! That is literally my whole budget! I would still need dress, DJ, photographer, flowers, videographer , etc.

No making room! We find cheaper! Plus is we wait longer then more vendors have less wiggle room because it's us at our price or they don't have a job for that wedding weekend Perks of October wedding!