Creating The Wedding Budget

The best plan for creating a wedding budget is taking a series of important steps before making your first plan or purchase. You can't create a realistic budget without knowing approximately what things cost in your area. For instance, you don't want to create a budget and then get stunned when you find out that photography packages start at N150,000 in your area when you only budgeted N50,000 for that.

1. Do plenty of research. Invest your time in meeting with all kinds of experts, getting printed price lists, and really knowing the details of what everything costs. Then sit down and look at your available funds to figure out what kind of wedding you will have.

2. Talk with parents and relatives to see if they will be willing and able to help pay for some of the wedding expenses or the whole wedding. (Not all parents can split the bill or foot the bill these days. Many offer to pay for the makeup or cake or the honeymoon, etc.)

3. Make a Priority List of which wedding elements are important to you (catering, entertainment, makeup, decoration, gown, and photos) and by doing the math, you decide you'll spend, say, 75% of your budget on those things, while spending less on (or doing without) the others. It may take a few steps and some extra time, but it's so worth it to create a good, flexible budget that keeps you reined in, yet still able to spend a little more than you planned for here and there without a ton of guilt. The best budgets are just there to guide you, not make you feel guilty or stressed...they're designed to keep you from losing control.