What busted your budget?

Our photographer isn’t “breaking” the budget but it is more than we planned! $2400 for 10 hours with one photographer!

Photography is where we blew our budget. But I love her and her work so I think it will be worth it!!! Also. No one I know has done/is doing heli photos so it will be unique!

My venue! It is costing more than expected but luckily this is just coming from our contingency budget.

Rentals! We ended up splitting them between 2 companies so that we could get the best prices on things.

The thing that has surprised me the most cost wise was the limo. I knew the rest was going to be expensive but for some reason I didn’t think the limo was going to be this expensive. We have 9 people in the wedding party including us. I’ve been told a regular stretch limo which says it will seat 10 will not be a good idea as when you add in the size of my dress etc it’s going to be super cramped so we need to look at a stretched SUV.

Photography! But we didn't have a set budget for that yet so it didn't exactly count. Totally worth the price though!

Dress and accessories I said not more than 1500 for everything including hair and make up. My dress was just shy of 1300. My mom paid for the veil as a gift to me which was 200 +. I still have shoes, accessories, slip, hair and make up and corset to buy.

Everything!? But to narrow it down, we spent a lot on our DJ and I rented chairs that we had not budgeted for.

Our photographer! We had originally budgeted $2000 for our day of/engagement photos but could not find ANYONE for that budget. We found a couple photographers for $2000-$2200... but they hadn't actually shot a wedding on their own yet. So we upped our budget once we found the PERFECT photographer.. for $2400. this we could handle, thank-you contingency fund!

We never really cared or thought about taxes before. Living in Quebec you kinda just suck it up, land of the "taxed for everything." But we got our catering quote today and the gratuity and taxes threw us off. $10 more per plate than we originally thought and then add the extra tax and tip, were at $2,000 over our budget.

Although we never set a budget in stone, it was crazy to think the catering cost as much as our venue! And our venue was already sitting at just a little over $6,000 😱😱

Our catering was what caught us off guard ! We searched around and found one that even had a fairly low cost, but , it still added up so fast !

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I feel this! In ON it's a 13% HST so there's always an extra cost on top of what you think it costs!

Pretty much everything about wedding planning made me re-prioritize the budget.

I originally thought that a pop-up wedding was the way to go, due to the fact that I didn't want the hassle of planning a wedding back home, and I initially wanted a courthouse wedding (for simplicity's sake). Of course, my soon-to-be husband convinced me otherwise. We currently live in Toronto together but we're having our wedding in Winnipeg for friends and family so that makes it even more fun.

The pop-up wedding company we almost went with covered the ceremony (photography, decoration, officiant, etc) for about $3,000. They had one specific day we could wed on because it was a themed multi-wedding day event for them where they marry different people in the same room all day, only resetting it after each ceremony and photography session was finished. All we had to do was plan the reception for the evening. Because of the time of year, and how late I started planning, the best I could find was a $4,000 dinner at a restaurant. This didn't cover decorations or another photographer, or any extras; just dinner. I really didn't want just a dinner as some of my family was coming from three hours out of town.

So I opted to restart all the planning this month, found a venue for the whole day, a photographer, decorator, and all for the same date. Although, I'm paying about $3,000 more for it, I'm much happier knowing every detail is exactly what I wanted/chose instead of leaving it up to others.

Our flowers!!!! I'm obsessed with real flowers and decided to cut our silk flowers from our decorator to be used towards fresh. We ended up doubling our price in fresh.

Venue! We had actually booked our venue before we got engaged, so we broke our budget before we even started! The thing that got us was that they didn't have a cash bar option. We were able to cut corners with decor and flowers, so it wasn't too much over our original goal.

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Haha, that's very true. I'm from a small town where open bars are unheard of so it will be the opposite culture shock when people find out it's free booze. All the other venues I researched charge guests like $7-12 a drink and I agree, as much as we hadn't planned on the open bar, we want our guests to have a good time, not worry about forking out $100 a couple on beverages.

That's a good way to save. We decided on an adults on wedding - we don't really have any kids in our immediate friends or family and about 25 between the ages of 10-18 (which our venue counts as adults) with our cousins or friends so we took them out and saved around $3k. Boom - open bar!

At first we thought it would be the open bar but then my fiancé’s parents said they were going to pay for it. Now we have plenty of room in our budget to spend a little more on other things so it all worked out

View quoted message Breanne it is great that your venue will charge you by bottle instead of drink.

In our case, it wasn’t even an option not to have an open bar. I come from Europe and so some of the guests are from there, where it is unthinkable to not have an open bar. Plus I thought it would be really cheap on my side being like “thanks for travelling 5000km, now please pay for your drinks”

Wr just shortened the guest list a little bit though.

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Us too. We weren't planning on having an open bar, but the venue we fell in love with requires it. Honestly it's a lot cheaper than I thought it would be (they buy us the booze and charge us by bottle, not by drink) and I think it's great we can give back to our guests but it was a few grand I wasn't originally planning on.

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It's already been mentioned a few times... usually when there's money coming out of our account hahaXD

The venue itself that was offering everything we wanted for the day. Second was the photograher knowing that he did give us engegement pictures and the full day service of the day which was great.
DJ was the 3rd for a full day as well. They all added up easily.

Our photographer and our DJ got us. When I first created our budget, I was a little off on how much those things were actually going for to cost. So that, and the fact that we splurged on 2 venues, and my dress went a little over budget... we ended up going a little over. We’re hoping we can find savings elsewhere to help cover the cost. But we aren’t too much over, so I’m sure we will figure it out.

I was surprised at the cost of photographers and we went with a higher priced one because pictures are important to me, this meant we had to reorganize the budget !

The first thing was both our outfits. But what really blew the budget is that we are having a fully open bar.

View quoted message I'm sure at some point we'll want to drop everything and elope hahaha.

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Good point Valleyfields - I hadn't thought of this because it's just norm when you live here but it's so true! Most prices you are given (Venue, Photographer, DJ, Dresses, etc) are the price without tax, so here in Ontario when given a quote you still have to add the 13% tax ($130 for every $1000). By the time our wedding is paid for with all the bells and whistles we will have paid $4000 in tax. Ugh.

This might sound weird but it's the provincial tax.

We live in Alberta (5%) but are getting married in Chelsea, Québec (14%). For example, our venue rental fee is $3,000 but if you include tax to it, it's about $500 more. The food/alcohol provided at the venue will also include gratuities, so you can imagine how much more we'll be paying (+/- $3,000 more).

I wish we could've done it all in Canmore, but 95% of our family/friends are from the Ottawa/Gatineau area. So due to the cost of traveling within Canada, we decided that it would be best to have it in our hometown.

We knew this would be an "issue", but it's when you face it for the first time that you have to take a step back and rethink your budget.